Adrian Crenshaw
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2017–2026
46:19 · 81K views · Sep 25, 2015
Christopher Domas's Derbycon 2015 talk on the M/o/Vfuscator, a compiler that emits only x86 mov instructions, showing mov is Turing complete. It explains how a full machine is built from mov and why the output is a nightmare to reverse engineer.
HN calls it a legendary, clearly explained hacker talk whenever mov-only computing or anti-decompilation comes up.
11 comments from Hacker News
> 'Having worked on really "heavily obfuscated" code (flattened control flow, functions implemented in obfuscated VMs, custom incompatible ABI, cryptographic encryption of code, etc.), this gobfuscator looks comparatively easy :) ' For any HN readers who have not already encountered the MOVfuscator [1] I cannot recommend this Blackhat talk highly enough -- the x86 MOV instruction is turing complete, and it flattens arbitrary code to MOVs. It's also the only time I've ever seen brainfuck being used as a seriously sensible intermediate language ;-) [1] this video [I think this is the preferred link!]
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 [LINK] - The MoVfuscator this video - Hardware Backdoors in redacted x86 [LINK]
If you haven't seen it, the original conference talk on the Movfuscator is excellent – this video – it goes through it in detail and describes how version 0.0 had Brainfuck as a totally legitimately valid intermediate language ;-)
I came back to reply with just this. Christopher Domas's conference talk on the movfuscator is legendary: this video
I'm surprised the Movfuscator hasn't been mentioned yet. It compiles C code into unconditional MOVs, and if you watch the author's Derbycon 2015 video there are ways you can scramble the MOV instructions, truely making it a decompilation nightmare. 1. Movfuscator page [LINK] 2. Derbycon 2015 video this video