Apple’s .car File Format
Ordinal0 (via Hacker News):
In this post, I’ll walk through the process of reverse engineering the
.carfile format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple’s proprietary tools.As part of this research, I’ve built a custom parser and compiler for
.carfiles that doesn’t depend on any of Apple’s private frameworks or proprietary tools. To make this research practical, I’ve compiled my parser to WebAssembly so it runs entirely in your browser, so no server uploads required. You can drop any.carfile into the interactive demo below to explore its content.[…]
From the decompiled
BOMStorageOpenWithSysfunction shown above, we can infer the overall layout of a BOM file. It begins with a fixed-size header, followed by a block index table and a variables table.[…]
While standard BOM files store installer package manifests,
.carfiles repurpose the container for asset storage.
