Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

This is an incredible write up. As soon as I saw the steps about patching mitm, I knew this would be special... wow!

This write up is a great answer to the often-asked question “how do I learn to be a hacker?”. It does a great job of demonstrating the thought process and painstaking work that goes into any exploit.

that's not really a "flaw" in protobuf; the protobuf is Working As Intended by decoding the field in a different place when you modify it.

i am not sure how one could possibly characterize that as a "flaw," since protobuf is a field-numeric length-prefixed protocol in the first place. it makes a (reasonable) assumption that bytes won't be messed with over the wire, leaving integrity to the reader, so even if this _was_ a flaw, it would be a flaw in the YouTube app for iOS, not in protobuf...

since it isn't a flaw, it isn't an "exploit," unless you are referring to the fact that youtube's protobuf exchange on their iOS app isn't checking hashes for returned payloads.

i suspect after this post they will

Very nice writeup. I was kinda hoping to find a way to MITM devices that don't allow the installation of custom CA's. I have some IoT devices that do not expose a local API and only exposes the data through the cloud, and would like to capture the device to cloud traffic...

I guess the only way to do that would be to dump the flash memory, replace the CA and reupload the dump to the device?

This shows how little they care, or poor engineering, or both.

Failing all engineering effort, they could have use a beefer CPU...