Binary obfuscation that doesn't kill LTO (blog.farzon.org)

by noztol 96 comments 145 points
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96 comments

[−] wincy 37d ago
This is decidedly not what I’d expect to be discussed at Thotcon. That said, super interesting!

As an avid pirate, I’ll say these days even the Denuvo game which were going years without cracks now have “cracks”, although they rely on hypervisor fixes and disabling secure boot and giving the hypervisor cracks unfettered access to your system to intercept the Denuvo checks. [0] It’s a dangerous game we’re playing to keep these AAA games bottom lines fat.

[0] https://www.thefpsreview.com/2026/04/03/denuvo-has-been-brok...

[−] NooneAtAll3 37d ago

> While security researchers love the entropy of randomized function layouts

I don't think any competent security researcher has anything positive to say about "security through obscurity"

at best this is lawyer position

[−] maxwg 37d ago
Link to the slides (almost missed it when i was reading): https://farzon.org/files/presentations/Thotcon_talk_may_2025...

Which provides way more information than the article

[−] RobotToaster 37d ago
Between this and rootkits masquerading as anticheat, video games are starting to look indistinguishable from malware
[−] p1necone 37d ago
Echoing the other comments here - why? What is the threat model here and how does this protect you from it?
[−] Fokamul 37d ago
[−] Zironic 37d ago
I'm a bit perplexed by the choice of Nintendo Switch as the example hardware. I was under the impression that the switch was locked down and you can't run offset based cheat software like cheatengine on it.
[−] bgirard 37d ago
I’ve noticed that LLMs can effortlessly read minified JS. How does it do with obfuscated binary code? I wonder if the days of obfuscation are numbered when the tedious job of de-obfuscation can be automated.