Epona and the Obfuscation Paradox: Transparent for Users, a Pain for Reversers

This blog post demonstrates through an example how the Epona obfuscating compiler, from the Epona Application Protection Suite, achieves the challenge of facilitating the everyday experience of its users while enabling better obfuscation schemes trade-offs.

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Unaligned accesses in C/C++: what, why and solutions to do it properly

CPUs used to perform better when memory accesses are aligned, that is when the pointer value is a multiple of the alignment value. This differentiation still exists in current CPUs, and still some have only instructions that perform aligned accesses. To take into account this issue, the C standard has alignment rules in place, and so the compilers exploit them to generate efficient code whenever possible. As we will see in this article, we need to be careful while casting pointers around to be sure not to break any of these rules. The goal of this article is to be educative by showcasing the problem and by giving some solutions to easily get over it.

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