Alex's curiosity was piqued. He had worked with VMProtect before, but never encountered a case that seemed "unbreakable." He downloaded the attachment, a 2MB executable file named mystery.vmexe . The file was encrypted with VMProtect, a popular virtual machine-based protector that made analysis notoriously difficult.
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IDA Pro (with Hex-Rays) or Ghidra.
: Jonathan Salwan's VMProtect-devirtualization project uses symbolic execution and LLVM to automatically deobfuscate pure functions.
Mark the virtual register states as "tainted." Track how data flows through the handlers. This allows you to completely ignore the hundreds of junk instructions VMProtect inserts to confuse you, isolating only the instructions that actually modify the state. vmprotect reverse engineering
He filtered the logs, looking for the connect system call. He found it. connect(sockfd, sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(443), sin_addr=inet_addr("10.0.0.5"), 16)
VMProtect supports three primary protection modes: Alex's curiosity was piqued
Decrypt the bytecode and determine which internal handler matches the instruction.