Mac OS X Memory Reading

[enteleky]

Currently I am using this(Free file hosting by Savefile.com) code to read and write memory to other processes on Mac OS X, and on Mac OS X you have to be in the group procmod or have root privileges to read or write memory. Simply put I have a program I made that I want to read parts of memory out of the WoW client and I run the program as root but I still get this error message:

Program received signal EXC_BAD_ACCESS, Could not access memory.
Reason: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at address: 0x00000001

even though I am root. I was wondering if anyone here had any ideas about it. I understand that most everyone uses Windows but I was just hoping that someone might have come up against this before.

[argh44z]

Doesn't OSX implement the ptrace syscall? It's pretty standard amongst Unix and unix-like operating systems (including Linux). You can use PTRACE_PEEK_DATA w/ it. Most debuggers, such as gdb, are implemented using ptrace.

[enteleky]

Mac OS X's implementation of ptrace is gutted and ripped out... You are not allowed to ptrace a process except for your own without a kernel module which I don't want to use because its slightly unstable.

By the way if you don't want to look at the source code of the above I am using these functions:

task_for_pid()
vm_read_overwrite() <--- This one is failing with that message even though I get the task_for_pid() which is a protected function... Its like World of Warcraft has told the kernel to extra protect its memory but I have been searching for unix functions to do that and I have found none.