HackerTube

THE VIDEO SHELF · mov-only computation

Break Me00 The MoVfuscator Turning mov into a soul crushing RE nightmare Christopher Domas

Christopher Domas's Derbycon 2015 talk on the M/o/Vfuscator, a compiler that emits only x86 mov instructions, showing mov is Turing complete. It explains how a full machine is built from mov and why the output is a nightmare to reverse engineer.

Watch & explore the libraryYouTube ↗

Why HN readers recommended it

HN calls it a legendary, clearly explained hacker talk whenever mov-only computing or anti-decompilation comes up.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
Adrian Crenshaw
Topic
mov-only computation
Format
talk
Level
advanced
HN recommenders in dataset
6
HN mentions in dataset
11
Recommendation years in dataset
2017–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • > 'Having worked on really "heavily obfuscated" code (flattened control flow, functions implemented in obfuscated VMs, custom incompatible ABI, cryptographic encryption of code, etc.), this gobfuscator looks comparatively easy :) ' For any HN readers who have not already encountered the MOVfuscator [1] I cannot …

    azalemeth on Hacker News · 2020-11
    In Blackrota: obfuscated backdoor written in Go

  • If you haven't seen it, the original conference talk on the Movfuscator is excellent – [VIDEO] – it goes through it in detail and describes how version 0.0 had Brainfuck as a totally legitimately valid intermediate language ;-)

    azalemeth on Hacker News · 2023-11
    In M/o/Vfuscator: The single instruction C compiler

  • I came back to reply with just this. Christopher Domas's conference talk on the movfuscator is legendary: [VIDEO]

    mk_stjames on Hacker News · 2025-09
    In Weird CPU architectures, the MOV only CPU (2020)

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.