iphone - How to determine at run-time if app is for development, app store or ad hoc distribution?

Question

Is there a way to determine programmatically if the currently running app was built and signed for development only or whether it was built for distribution? And can one determine if was build for app store or ad hoc distribution?

Is it e.g. possibly to access the code signature and get the information from there? Or are there certain files present in one of variants that don't exist in the other ones? Is part of the bundle info? Or can it be derived from the executable file?

Any hints are appreciated.

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It seems that the embedded.mobileprovision file is in ASN.1 format.

Answer 1

The easiest way to check is to look at embedded.mobileprovision ([[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"embedded.mobileprovision" ofType:nil]):

• It's a bit of a pain to parse since it's a signed plist (PKCS#7 signed data, according to openssl asn1parse -inform der), but a bad hack is to just look for <plist and </plist>.
• Development contains UDIDs and <key>get-task-allow</key><true/>
• Ad Hoc distribution contains UDIDs (and get-task-allow=false)
• App Store distribution contains no UDIDs.

The other thing you can check is the entitlements embedded in the executable (otool -l lists it as LC_CODE_SIGNATURE). Parsing this is even more tedious (you need to parse the Mach-O header and load commands, and for "universal" binaries which are now the default, you'll need to check the currently-loaded architecture or all architectures).

• Development builds contain <key>get-task-allow</key><true/>
• Ad Hoc and App Store builds contain <key>get-task-allow</key><false/>

I don't think the entitlements distinguish between Ad Hoc and App Store builds.

Apart from those and the certificate it's signed with, there's no difference between Development/Ad Hoc/App Store apps (there are a few other things in the entitlements/provisioning profile, but nothing more reliable that I can think of).

Security considerations

Neither of these are that difficult to circumvent. For the first method, the app could just "swizzle" -[NSBundle pathForResource:ofType:]. The second method is a bit more difficult depending on what API you use to read the file.