movfuscator
[index]
[3,386 page views]
At DEFCON 23, security researcher Chris Domas unveiled the movfuscator. Essentially, Chris built off the work of Stephen Dolan’s proof that the x86 instruction mov
is Turing Complete (pdf). When a machine is defined as Turing Complete, in colloquial programming terms it simply means that it can simulate all general computing tasks. Thus, in declaring mov
as Turing Complete, Stephen says that an entire program can be written with nothing but combinations of that one instruction. Chris in turn built the movfuscator to take a binary as its input and output a new binary composed of nothing but mov
instructions. Certainly, any reverse engineer opening a binary of nothing but an endless list of mov
will quickly hate their life.