DEFCONConference
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2016–2026
38:49 · 173K views · Dec 25, 2015
Chris Domas's DEF CON 23 talk on psychological warfare against reverse engineers. He builds code whose disassembly and control flow graphs mislead, intimidate and demoralize anyone analyzing it.
Recommended as an entertaining and well-explained talk on anti-reverse-engineering tricks.
7 comments from Hacker News
I cannot wait for the accompanying Black Hat talk. Christopher Domas is one of my absolute favorite all-time hackers. He does such a fantastic job of explaining his work. Some of my favorite talks of his: - Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering this video - The MoVfuscator [LINK] - Hardware Backdoors in redacted x86 [LINK]
Makes me think of what might deter a reverse engineer and then this most awesome youtube talk on psychological warfare by Chris Domas this video It's so good.
Saw this recently after reviewing some Defcon 23 videos. The author goes into detail about how it's working and some other fun stuff regarding anti-reverse-engineering. 2015 DEFCON 23 - Chris Domas - Repsych: Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering this video And a paper by him: [LINK]
this video about 7 minutes in he is chatting about it but all is a good watch - could only find the YT link sorry
You can visualize the actual execution of software at a very low level using the "graph views" built into "binary code analysis tools" (decompilers/disassemblers) like IDA Pro, Ghidra, and Radare2. Many of these tools can generate absolutely HUGE graphs showing the control flow of raw assembly, though they're frequently so large that they're more overwhelming than helpful. Hence why most of the time they are used to generate graphs of small and complex sub-sections of software. Here are some example images showing control-flow graphs by different disassemblers/binary code analysis tools: [0] Ghidra control flow graph, relatively zoomed in: [LINK] Taken from this stackoverflow: [LINK] [1] Radare2 showing control flow graphs in ascii in the terminal: [LINK] [2] IDA Pro control flow graph, relatively large and zoomed out: [LINK] From this stackexchange: [LINK] [3] Defcon talk by Chris Domas where they demonstrated automate code generation which would cause various binary code analysis tools to generate control-flow graphs which formed specific shapes, shapes meant to offend or demoralize researchers examining the code (quite entertaining): this video