DEF CON 23 - Chris Domas - Repsych: Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as an entertaining and well-explained talk on anti-reverse-engineering tricks.
What it is
Chris Domas's DEF CON 23 talk on psychological warfare against reverse engineers. He builds code whose disassembly and control flow graphs mislead, intimidate and demoralize anyone analyzing it.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2016 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec MrQuincle · 2021-09 · on “JSFuck (2012)”
Makes me think of what might deter a reverse engineer and then this most awesome youtube talk on psychological warfare by Chris Domas [this video] It's so good.
Strong rec MattSteelblade · 2026-08 · on “Spaghettifying DRAM”
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 [this video] - The MoVfuscator [LINK] - Hardware Backdoors in redacted x86 [LINK]
Recommends projectdp · 2016-08 · on “Movfuscator – A single-instruction C compiler”
Saw this recently after reviewing some Defcon 23 videos. The author goes into detail about how it's working and some other fun stuff regarding anti-reverse-engineering. 2015 DEFCON 23 - Chris Domas - Repsych: Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering [this video] And a paper by him: [LINK]
Recommends hulahoof · 2016-08 · on “Movfuscator – A single-instruction C compiler”
[this video] about 7 minutes in he is chatting about it but all is a good watch - could only find the YT link sorry
Cites shoo · 2018-04 · on “Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter”
tangentially, the "blueprint spaghetti" link is pretty great: [LINK] at a former job i knew a team of devs who built and maintained a framework to help teams of researchers put together pipelines of simulation (often fluid simulation), animation, rendering, etc. This framework had its own blueprinting functionality. One of the cute features they had was nested blueprints -- e.g. you could define some blueprint, and abstract it behind an interface as its own component, then re-use the component in another blueprint. So i guess in a "blueprints from hell" scenario that lets you have "fractal blueprints from hell". edit: i'm also reminded of Chris Domas' defcon talk "Psychological Warfare in Re
Cites Verdex · 2020-09 · on “Security by obscurity is underrated”
In nature, prey animals will sometimes jump when they spot a predator[1]. One of the explanations is that this is the animal communicating to the predator that it is a healthy prey animal that would be hard to catch and therefore the predator should choose to chase someone else. I think we can kind of view obscurity in the same way. It's a way to signal to a predator that we're a hard target and that they should give up. Of course in the age of automation, relying on obscurity alone is foolish because once someone has automated an attack that defeats the obscurity, then it is little or no effort for an attacker to bypass it. Of course, sprinkling a little bit of obscurity on top of a good se
Cites lelandbatey · 2022-01 · on “How do you visualize code?”
You can visualize the actual execution of software at a very low level using the "graph views" built into "binary code analysis tools" (decompilers/disassemblers) like IDA Pro, Ghidra, and Radare2. Many of these tools can generate absolutely HUGE graphs showing the control flow of raw assembly, though they're frequently so large that they're more overwhelming than helpful. Hence why most of the time they are used to generate graphs of small and complex sub-sections of software. Here are some example images showing control-flow graphs by different disassemblers/binary code analysis tools: [0] Ghidra control flow graph, relatively zoomed in: [LINK] Taken from this stackoverflow: [LINK] [1] Rad