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Comment by programmarchy | Hacker News Reader

How many of these tricks are off the shelf techniques? Seems like a tremendous effort.

OP here. About half are off the shelf. Joint functions, the breakpoint infinite loop, in-house memmove, the overflowing thing, those I haven’t read about anywhere before.

For the overflow, Jagex with RuneScape did it in Java. They also did stupid Object arrays 7 or so levels deep, doing casts on casts in between. The bytecode itself made the actual runtime slow to a crawl (anywhere from 5 to 10x slowdown.) This was circa 2014.

That’s interesting to know

> the breakpoint infinite loop

This is a fairly standard debugging technique.

> in-house memmove

You sure they didn't just statically link a libc?

> the breakpoint infinite loop

Have seen multiple times in CTFs

Usually the good CTFs don't stoop to stupid tricks like these, to be fair.

There are numerous commercial compilers (for C and C++) that specialize in obfuscation. I suspect they are using one because to do that level of obfuscation manually would make the source code unreadable.

Yup, they actually acquired anti-reverse engineering startup Strong.codes after using their software for years

OP, your comments are showing up dead so you might be shadow-banned.

Thanks for letting me know! I contacted support.

Your account's fine, but some comments were getting caught in a software filter. Sorry! I've marked it legit so this won't happen again.

(Fortunately users vouched for all the affected comments, so they were unkilled before mods got to this thread. That's exactly what the vouch feature is for and I love to see it work so well.)

Hi dang, why is my latest submission flagged?

You should send that question to hn@ycombinator.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com