Our new X account is live! Follow @wizwand_team for updates
WorkDL logo mark

Exposing Hidden Interfaces: LLM-Guided Type Inference for Reverse Engineering macOS Private Frameworks

About

Private macOS frameworks underpin critical services and daemons but remain undocumented and distributed only as stripped binaries, complicating security analysis. We present MOTIF, an agentic framework that integrates tool-augmented analysis with a finetuned large language model specialized for Objective-C type inference. The agent manages runtime metadata extraction, binary inspection, and constraint checking, while the model generates candidate method signatures that are validated and refined into compilable headers. On MOTIF-Bench, a benchmark built from public frameworks with groundtruth headers, MOTIF improves signature recovery from 15% to 86% compared to baseline static analysis tooling, with consistent gains in tool-use correctness and inference stability. Case studies on private frameworks show that reconstructed headers compile, link, and facilitate downstream security research and vulnerability studies. By transforming opaque binaries into analyzable interfaces, MOTIF establishes a scalable foundation for systematic auditing of macOS internals.

Arina Kharlamova, Youcheng Sun, Ting Yu• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Objective-C Type RecoveryMOTIF-Bench
Avg Accuracy42.4
17
Type InferencePrivate macOS Frameworks (MOTIF) (test)
PM Accuracy75.2
9
Showing 2 of 2 rows

Other info

Follow for update