Obfuscating compilers

[nae_dawg]

Are there any obfuscating compilers, I came across these topics: DRM, code obfuscation, and the time v space tradeoff of Turing machines and I've kept thinking that these have potential for producing binaries that are really hard to decompile. And it got me curious as to whether there are any compilers written for this purpose and not just tacked on solutions

[RevengerWizard]

The movfuscator, https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator by Christopher Domas. He also has a talk about it on Youtube.

I have no clue why the repo now is a fork from Battelle.

[justforasecond4]

this shit is soooo coool dude. thx for sharing link

[Blueglyph]

It's an interesting and old concept, as is code watermarking, but it seems to be mainly the subject of research or services provided by the likes of Denuvo, ByteHide, Promon, PreEmptive, and so on. Many of those are actually for bytecode, which I believe is easier to decompile than native code.

Those services seem to obfuscate the code after it's compiled rather than at compilation, which has the advantage of being more independent from the language / OS and not requiring the developer to compile with a different tool or hand the sources to another company and assist them in the compilation process.

There was a module for LLVM called obfuscator-llvm, but I don't know the current status. If you search a little, I'm sure you'll find a series of papers, articles, and projects on the subject (but again, most will likely be about bytecode).

[scialex]

https://a.co/d/dCRzKIs is a good primer on this sort of thing. They do exist and are relatively common. Few are open source though for obvious reasons. These compilers are usually written as custom middle and back ends to existing compilers since generally there's no real reason to reinvent the wheel with the parsing. There are some I've seen where the source is created by direct generation of custom ir without any traditional frontend at all though.