Andrea Fortuna, a cybersecurity professional, writes about digital forensics, Linux tips, vulnerabilities, and security policy.
HN commenters link it as a source for forensics topics such as amcache and shimcache, iPhone metadata, and /dev/tcp tricks.
Why would (pseudocode, nonexisting but possible example) write(SIGKILL, "/proc/12345/signals") not be possible? For the other direction, there is signalfd in Linux. And of course you can get a peer address from /dev/tcp (https://andreafortuna.org/2021/03/06/some-useful-tips-about-dev-tcp/ ). Yes, /dev/tcp is not an OS primitive but a bash builtin, but there isn't really a reason you cannot do this in the OS. Shared memory can be a file, you just have to mmap() it. mmap is always left out of the open/close/read/write-enumeration of the traditional file API, but I think it is actually extremely useful and should be the fifth alongside those.
Debugging is hard to imagine, yes. One could look at /proc/12345/mem, write breakpoints in there, but I'm not sure about how to do the more exotic things.
There is a tool used in malware analysis and computer forensics called Volatility[0]. It has some very powerful analysis tools and works on Linux Mac and Windows. In your case its ability to dump the memory of a running process without messing with the process state [1] may be very helpful! It also has the ability to run a Yara scan against the dumped memory which could let you find the region of memory containing the config file (so long as you know some of the strings in it).
Hope this helps!
[0] https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility
[1] https://www.andreafortuna.org/2017/07/10/volatility-my-own-cheatsheet-part-3-process-memory/
I was wondering this too.
This isn't a direct answer to your question, but a quick search turned up this article for finding unsecured assets in a Google bucket https://www.andreafortuna.org/2019/08/07/some-useful-tools-for-finding-unsecure-google-storage-buckets/
Pretty soon you could get through it with an unmodified iPad...
https://www.andreafortuna.org/2021/03/13/coding-on-ipad-pro-my-own-setup/
Not sure when it's going to be out of beta.
First page, first result on Google:
https://andreafortuna.org/2025/11/30/hidden-metadata-reveals-what-your-iphone-silently-records-about-you
Checkout amcache and shimcache, recent files, bam/dam. https://andreafortuna.org/2017/10/16/amcache-and-shimcache-in-forensic-analysis/