Calling getsectiondata from Swift - swift

Question

This question and answer describe how to read data from a Mach-O section with Objective-C on modern OS X/macOS versions: Crash reading bytes from getsectbyname
The described answer works. I'm trying to implement the same thing with Swift. I can't make it work.
I have the following in "Other linker flags": -Wl,-sectcreate,__LOCALIZATIONS,__base,en.lproj/Localizable.strings,-segprot,__LOCALIZATIONS,r,r.
This Swift code gets me the a pointer to the embedded data, until I try to run the code outside Xcode and ASLR breaks it:
var size: UInt = 0
let _localizationSection = getsectdata(
"__LOCALIZATIONS",
"__base",
&size)
To get around the ASLR problem, according to the above question and answer, and based on my own testing, I should be using getsectiondata instead. It works great in Objective-C, but I'm having no luck in Swift. The following is the only thing I've managed to get past the compiler, but it returns nil:
var size: UInt = 0
var header = _mh_execute_header
let localizationSection = getsectiondata(
&header,
"__LOCALIZATIONS",
"__base",
&size)
Is taking a copy of _mh_execute_header the problem and is there any way to avoid it? I need an UnsafePointer<mach_header_64>, but using &_mh_execute_header as the first parameter to getsectiondata causes a compilation error.
I'm using Swift 3.0, and running my code on macOS 10.12.

Answer 1

The difference between the linked-to Objective-C code
void *ptr = getsectiondata(&_mh_execute_header, ...);
and your Swift translation
var header = _mh_execute_header
let localizationSection = getsectiondata(&header, ...)
is that the latter passes the address of a copy of the global
_mh_execute_header variable to the function, and apparently that
is not accepted. If you modify the Objective-C code to
struct mach_header_64 header = _mh_execute_header;
void *ptr = getsectiondata(&header, ...);
then it fails as well (and actually crashed in my test).
Now the problem is that _mh_execute_header is exposed to Swift
as a constant:
public let _mh_execute_header: mach_header_64
and one cannot take the address of a constant in Swift. One possible
workaround is to define
#import <mach-o/ldsyms.h>
static const struct mach_header_64 *mhExecHeaderPtr = &_mh_execute_header;
in the bridging header file, and then use it as
let localizationSection = getsectiondata(mhExecHeaderPtr, ...)
in Swift.
Another option is to lookup the symbol via dlopen/dlsym
import MachO
if let handle = dlopen(nil, RTLD_LAZY) {
defer { dlclose(handle) }
if let ptr = dlsym(handle, MH_EXECUTE_SYM) {
let mhExecHeaderPtr = ptr.assumingMemoryBound(to: mach_header_64.self)
var size: UInt = 0
let localizationSection = getsectiondata(
mhExecHeaderPtr,
"__LOCALIZATIONS",
"__base",
&size)
// ...
}
}