Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Mac Installer format: XAR or DMG? #545

Open
ankd1601 opened this issue Dec 30, 2024 · 0 comments
Open

Mac Installer format: XAR or DMG? #545

ankd1601 opened this issue Dec 30, 2024 · 0 comments

Comments

@ankd1601
Copy link

ankd1601 commented Dec 30, 2024

I am working on tool that extracts and views contents of various archives. One such archive is DMG. Tool is correctly extracting DMG archives. But one specific type of DMG file which is macOS Big Sur installer,SharedSupport.dmg or any other similar installer like Ventura and so on, is not getting extracted, as it has XAR header as well. So structure seems different from the other ones. When inspecting the byte stream,I see both a XAR and a DMG structure.

To be more specific, it has:

  1. the XAR signature "78 61 72 21" at the beginning of the file,
  2. and the DMG signature "6B 6F 6C 79" at the end of the file, i.e., there is a 512 byte-trailer that contains the magic signature "koly".

Any DMG package other than a macOS installer does not have such signature at the beginning of the file.

Does that mean a macOS installer isn't actually a DMG file but a XAR file? Why does it have XAR header?

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant