[noduerme]

This is really awesome work.

I spent a lot of time in the early 2000s coming up with nasty obfuscation techniques to protect certain IP that inherently needed to be run client-side in casino games. Up to and including inserting bytecode that was custom crafted to intentionally crash off-the-shelf decompilers that had to run the code to disassemble it (and forcing them to phone home in the process where possible!)

My view on obfuscation is that since it's never a valid security practice, it's only admissible for hiding machinery from the general public. For instance, if you have IP you want to protect from average script kiddies. Any serious IP can be replicated by someone with deep pockets anyway. Most other uses of code obfuscation are nefarious, and obfuscated code should always be assumed to be malicious until proven otherwise. I'm not a reputable large company, but no reputable large company should be going to these lengths to hide their process from the user, because doing so serves no valid security purpose.

[dbrueck]

Agreed - obfuscation is useful for keeping honest people honest. If someone is sufficiently motivated, they will circumvent it, but for the vast majority of people it's just not worth the effort so they'll move to something else.

For example, in our application we have some optionally downloadable content that includes some code for an interpreted language. That code lives on disk in an obfuscated form because we are not yet ready to make the API public (it's on our "someday" roadmap), we don't want to clean up the code for public viewing, and above all because there are different licensing requirements around each content pack.

We looked at various "real" security options and they all have holes, and they all add a ton of complexity. We then also looked at the likely intersection between "people who would pay for this" and "people who could crack this", and there's not much there. In the end, obfuscation is cheap (especially in terms of implementation and maintenance) and steers our real customers away violating the license, and we don't waste resources on dishonest people.

If I'm being charitable, the obfuscation in the article has an out of whack cost/benefit ratio. If I'm being cynical, the obfuscation they are doing strays well into the realm of nefarious. :)

[thrashh]

People knock on obfuscation but everything in life is based on trust. Locks being breakable, the fruit stand in front of a shop being unprotected, fences being scalable. Everything is a cost/benefit

[rowanG077]

It's the curse of ideological purity you see in a lot of the tevh sevtor. Most of these types are of the sort that either something is unbreakable or it's useless.

[noduerme]

Just as a fun aside, I was perusing some of my most ancient HN threads and came across this obfuscated monster which I totally forgot about. Pastebin links inside are still active ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3432800

[jstanley]

Wait, why is a casino protecting it's so-called "intellectual property" legitimate and above-board, but TikTok doing the same is not?

[margalabargala]

I don't think OP was defending their own earlier work or otherwise exempting it from their assertion that all obfuscated code should be considered malicious.

[jstanley]

Having reread it, I think you might be right.

> it's only admissible for hiding machinery from the general public.

I had originally read this to imply that somehow it's OK for a casino to hide its machinery from the general public, but it's not OK for TikTok to hide its machinery from the general public, but maybe "machinery" here is intended much more narrowly, and OP thinks it applies neither to casinos nor TikTok.

[compsciphd]

I read it as the only "legitimate" point is to hide it from the general public. As people with more resources will be able to figure it out. If you view that as legitimate is up to each person to decide. Does the value of trying to hide it from the general public have real value or not. In general the answer might be no.

[noduerme]

"General public" was really the wrong term. I meant people with the ability to decompile and use assets or portions of the code for their own games. This was in the early years of Bitcoin when fly-by-night casinos were sprouting up everywhere. Most of them were really badly coded - e.g. the slot machines looked like they'd been drawn by a six year old. Others looked like legitimate casinos, but were actually running cracked versions of white label software. Ours was the only in the space that had a large, professional, fully original codebase... that was what I meant by "machinery", not the machinery governing user interactions with the server (see my response above).

[rnd0]

That's how I read it too. I had the feeling that the experience convinced the OP that it's not valid except in some circumstances.

[noduerme]

Parent / casino founder here. The casino specialized in original, exotic games. The obfuscated portions of the front-end were game modules (including art assets) that were loaded after login. We had several games that we were filing for patents on. We were also in talks with a much larger online casino about licensing individual games and/or the software as a whole to them. The purpose of the obfuscation was to make it harder for competitors to decompile and get at raw assets or read the math by which the game mechanics worked. For instance, we had a 3D slot machine based on a Rubik's Cube that paid out based on the odds of being able to solve one side in N steps from any given randomly scrambled position. That algorithm had to exist client-side to calculate the odds visible to the user in realtime, along with server-side for confirmation against someone trying to cheat in the client.

I felt it was important to make it as hard as possible for someone to reverse engineer the unique mechanisms. Ultimately, it was probably a waste of time. This is why I think in most cases the uses of obfuscation are at best limited, but they can put a costly stumbling block for competitors if you want to encourage them to license your software rather than copy it. Where I think they tilt toward the nefarious is when they're designed to extract hidden data from end users. As a distinction, what went over the wire between the client game modules and the casino back-end were completely human-readable game states in all cases (besides the user's unique ID and session hash, which were named as such). There were no bullets of obfuscated fingerprints flying around. Any user was free to read what came and went from the API, and even to mess with it by adjusting parameters if they wanted to see what the server would accept or reject.

[neodymiumphish]

I think the distinction in what's obfuscated is important. Casino apps are trying to hide their code that detects cheating, number generation, etc, while TikTok is trying to hide its data collection. Obfuscation itself isn't necessarily bad.

[noduerme]

Cheating detection was essentially all conducted on the back-end in my casino, but I do think there's a use case for obfuscating some front-end monitoring, e.g. for bot-like inputs. We didn't explicitly ban poker bots, but we didn't make the API guide public, either. The cheating we were most concerned with was poker collusion, which could be detected by combing the log files for certain patterns of play correlated between users or IP addresses.

Random numbers are never generated in the client. Ours were generated on dedicated server separate from anything else - in a different country, for legal reasons - whose sole purpose was to generate random numbers on demand.

[im3w1l]

> Number generation

Number generation is extremely important and it's also regulated. You don't put such a thing in the client obfuscated or not.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Because they're doing it on hardware that they control.

[maria2]

White box crypto is kind of like obfuscation, but tries to make it impossible to extract the information.

[awestroke]

No, encryption is very different from obfuscation, even if the former is often used in the latter

[xurukefi]

You missed the point. maria2 is talking about whitebox crypto. The "whitebox" part means that the decryption process happens on your machine incuding the secrets, which are present in some obfuscated scrambled form in memory. Getting the secret key is a matter of debugging and understanding the obfuscation scheme. A prime example of this is DRM like Widevine (L3) in the chrome browser.

[bitexploder]

I am really failing to understand the distinction here. Encryption with say, AES has very different properties and use cases compared to an obfuscation scheme. You can use encryption as a part of an obfuscation scheme, but obfuscation is a shell game, all the way down. Crypto is not, mathematically. They are categorically different things, right?

[toast0]

Obfuscation with encryption can be done with good ciphers, like AES, but the key is still shipped with the code, so it's still just cat and mouse.

It's a little different if the key is hardware specific, so each binary only runs on one system and it's hard to extract the keys, but that's not a typical setup. Usually it's this code needs to run on the general public's computers or phones, and that's too general a target to rely on hardware crypto.

[matmann2001]

The key specifier word was "whitebox". They aren't speaking generally about cryptography.

[grog454]

The math is irrelevant when the key is known to all parties.

[bitexploder]

Sure. That is DRM and obfuscation in a nutshell. How annoying can I make this for you to reverse engineer?

[krackers]

There's also indistinguishability obfuscation which I recall recently had a breakthrough in terms of practical construction

[bobleeswagger]

> since it's never a valid security practice

Why not? It's just another tool in the security game.

I want to be with you on thinking that all obfuscation is malicious, I know that individuals have every right to obfuscation and privacy as a matter of the 1st and 4th amendments in the US, but I'm not sure I can always say that obfuscation by a corporation is evil, without a more compelling argument. I'm as anti-establishment as they come, too.

[mtnygard]

I read the GP a bit differently... I didn't read it as saying obfuscation is evil, just that it is ineffective. More like "obfuscation can't prevent reversing, therefore it's not a valid security practice since all it does is slow down the casual observer but does not stop the determined adversary." The statement that most use of obfuscation is nefarious is a corollary... since obfuscation doesn't protect IP it is mostly used to hide malicious activity.

[noduerme]

This, exactly. Thank you for putting it so succinctly.

[ViViDboarder]

I think l the reason is that it means that they don’t trust or don’t want their users to know what they are doing on your machine. To me, that is already a malicious premise. Even if they aren’t trying to exfiltrate my data or anything.

[bobleeswagger]

I guess the acceptable form of obfuscation would mean only IP is protected by it, not everything. I wonder what it would take to enforce this as the norm, certainly doesn't sound easy.