

Also while doing pentest using non-jailbroken iPhone, it is recommended to inject Frida server dylib in dummy app and install it on iPhone, which requires XCode.īut getting Mac/MacBook can be an expensive affair. But nowadays, using MacOS will have additional benefit such as automating IPA analysis via MobSF. In old days, using Windows/Linux based tools was enough for iOS appsec.

Running multiple apps in parallel was far from ideal, and led us back into the black-screen-crash territory.As a pentester, I often get projects to test iOS applications. However, we did have to be conscious not to overdo it. For us, they helped more with stability, significantly reducing OS crashes. We could use the VM to test some software apps and "get a feel" for how things work in macOS land, which this writer hadn't visited in years.Īs we mentioned before, you shouldn't expect perfect results, nor a drastic performance jump compared to before applying those tweaks. After the tweaks we saw, they were "usable enough" to, for example, grab the screenshot that accompanies this article. In our case, such programs were continuously forcing the VM to crash or "froze" for minutes. When you finally reach your virtualized Mac's desktop, try launching a relatively more graphics-heavy application than a mere notepad, like a web browser. With those tweaks applied, run your VMWare software and hit "play" on your macOS virtual machine. At the same time, as an OS, it relies heavily on a real Mac's GPU for its hardware-accelerated desktop. The virtualized software's requests are "parsed" by the virtual GPU driver and "fed" to the actual GPU.Īnd that's precisely where the problem lies with the latest macOS: it doesn't come with such drivers for a virtualized GPU. Unlike the rest of the VM, it's not an emulated graphics system instead, the host machine's GPU performs the necessary calculations. The virtual GPU driver allows virtual machines under VMWare and VirtualBox to achieve smooth animations and playback. The Importance of the Virtual GPU Driver for Smoother Sailing It acts as a "tunnel" that connects the virtual machine's software to the host machine's graphic driver. Out of all these drivers, the most important one for a noticeable performance is the virtual GPU driver.

One of the tasks those "tools" perform is enabling some of those "passthroughs" in the form of specialized drivers. If you've used VirtualBox or one of VMWare's solutions in the past, you've probably installed one of their "tools" variants in a virtualized OS "to make it perform better".
