A long time ago I wrote some code to make NSKeyedArchives (NSKA) human readable, basically de-serializing the data. It was then converted to a library for use in other projects like iLeapp and mac_apt. I revisited this last week and found and fixed a minor bug. While at it, I also added an extra capability, mostly for the folks who don't prefer to touch code.
Previously, this library only worked with NSKA files. If a file was a normal plist, it would return an exception complaining about not being able to find the '$archiver' element in the plist. But what if you had files that were normal plists (not serialised), but had nested NSKA plists as data blobs within. There are actually quite a few on ios/macOS. To make them human-readable, you would have to write code to extract the blobs and run them through the library. The previous code also did not handle recursive deserializing even within NSKA archives.
Now with the latest update (version 1.4.0), there is an extra parameter in the deserialize_plist(...) and deserialize_plist_from_string(...) functions to unlock this functionality and also performs full recursive deserializing of all nested blobs.
def deserialize_plist(path_or_file, full_recurse_convert_nska=False)
By default, the value is False emulating the old behaviour. However, when set to True, this will no longer return an exception for non-NSKA (unserialized or normal) plists and will always return a plist. If there was a data (binary blob) element anywhere in the tree that had a value containing a valid header for an NSKA plist, that will now be replaced with a tree branch representing the deserialized version of the NSKA data.
If you are using nska_deserialize dependancy in any project, update to the latest:
pip3 install nska_deserialize --upgrade
