How to hook C/C++ methods in Android using Cydia Substrate

Question

I checked the home of Cydia Substrate, the Android Jni Hook example provided by the author is actually hooking a Java method with C code.

But what I want is to hook a C/C++ method, i.e a method in a libXXX.so in Android. Like the fork() method in /system/lib/libc.so. Information from Cydia author and XDA seems to show that Cydia can do this. I searched all around the Internet but can't find an example.

Could anyone tell me how to hook C/C++ method in Android using Cydia?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 10 '14 at 10:35

Not really sure where to put this, because it's not exactly an answer, but maybe it'll put you in the right direction. Here's some code that shim/hooks fork(), written in C. In this case, it was written to detect if a sandboxed program was forking more than twice, but you could obviously modify the behavior as necessary.

#define MAKE_CALLTHROUGH(fx, libfx)                                            \
    do{                                                                        \
        void *handle = NULL;                                                   \
        if(!libfx){                                                            \
            handle = dlopen("/lib64/libc.so.6", RTLD_LAZY);                    \
            if(!handle){                                                       \
                fputs(dlerror(), stderr);                                      \
                exit(1);                                                       \
                return 0;                                                      \
            }                                                                  \
            libfx = dlsym(handle, fx);                                         \
            if(dlerror() != NULL){                                             \
                fprintf(stderr, "Could not make handle for function %s\n", fx);\
                exit(1);                                                       \
            }                                                                  \
        }                                                                      \
    }while(0);

const int MAX_FORKS = 2;
int forks = 0;

int fork(){
    static int (*libfork) (void) = NULL;
    MAKE_CALLTHROUGH("fork", libfork);
    if(forks++ > 2){
        fprintf(stderr, "Illegally exceeded 2 forks.\n");
        killpg(0, 9);
    }
    return libfork();
}

In case anyone was curious, I compiled it like this:

gcc -g -Wall -Wextra -fPIC -c watchshim.c -o watchshim.o
gcc -g -Wall -Wextra -fPIC -shared -ldl watchshim.o -o watchshim.so 

gcc -g -Wall -Wextra -pthread -o watch watch.c

Where watchshim.c is the file containing the shim/hook code, and watch.c is the process in which fork() is shimmed (it is also shimmed in all child processes of watch. "/lib64/libc.so.6" is the so containing the original fork(). I have MAKE_CALLTHROUGH written as a macro, because I was shimming multiple functions in the project I used this in.

How to hook C/C++ methods in Android using Cydia Substrate

1 Answers1