All posts for: Reverse engineering .NET MAUI

.NET MAUI, as the successor to Xamarin, enables the development of cross-platform applications, including Android, using C#. In previous versions (up to .NET MAUI 8), applications stored their DLL libraries in assemblies.blob and assemblies.manifest files, making extraction and analysis easier. Tools already existed to decompile these files, such as pyxamstore, which allowed for easy recovery of original libraries. With the release of .NET MAUI 9, a significant change was introduced in the way .NET libraries are packaged in Android applications. Instead of storing DLLs in separate files, all libraries are now embedded in ELF (.so) files named libassemblies.<arch>.blob.so, where <arch> refers to the processor architecture, e.g., arm64-v8a. This change aimed to improve performance, enhance security, and provide better compatibility with Android. In this article, I will explain how to extract these DLL files.