Did Apple change the .mobileprovision file format, and how can I view the current format?

Question

I'm finding many articles on the web where it is implied that you can view the .mobileprovision file contents in a text editor. For example, this Urban Airship post:

When push notifications are enabled for an app, the aps-environment key will appear in the .mobileprovision file specifying the provisioning profile:

<key>Entitlements</key>
<dict>
    <key>application-identifier</key>
...

However the mobilprovision files I have (obtained within the last few days) contain 466 1/2 rows of 8 groups of 4 hex digits, (e.g. 4851 3842 4176 2845 0a09 01a2 404d 4382). How can I view this type of file?

Answer 1

Provisioning Profiles are encoded. To decode them and examine the XML you can use this via command line:

security cms -D -i #{@profilePath}

where #{@profilePath} is the filepath to your .mobileprovision file.

A fuller Ruby example is:

require 'plist'
profile = `security cms -D -i #{@profilePath}`
xml = Plist::parse_xml(profile)
appID = xml['Entitlements']['application-identifier']