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

Adrian Crenshaw · talk · Watch on YouTube

Security & hackingCompilers, interpreters & program analysisComputability & complexity theory

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 6 people recommended it
  • 7 different months
  • 4 strong recommendations
  • first 2017, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “I cannot recommend this Blackhat talk highly enough”

    Black Hat talk showing x86 MOV is Turing complete

    azalemeth, 2020-11 · Strong recommendation · in “Blackrota: obfuscated backdoor written in Go”

  2. “Christopher Domas's conference talk on the movfuscator is legendary”

    Legendary conference talk on the movfuscator

    mk_stjames, 2025-09 · Strong recommendation · in “Weird CPU architectures, the MOV only CPU (2020)”

  3. “Christopher Domas is one of my absolute favorite all-time hackers. He does such a fantastic job of explaining his work.”

    Christopher Domas explaining the MoVfuscator, among favorite hacker talks

    MattSteelblade, 2026-08 · Strong recommendation · in “Spaghettifying DRAM”

  4. “if you watch the author's Derbycon 2015 video there are ways you can scramble the MOV instructions, truely making it a decompilation nightmare.”

    Derbycon talk on compiling C to only MOV instructions

    DogestFogey, 2017-11 · Recommendation · in “A Sampling of Anti-Decompilation Techniques”

  5. “Here's a really nifty talk he gives about it”

    Talk by the author on his one-instruction compiler

    xelxebar, 2018-01 · Recommendation · in “Redundancy of x86 Machine Code (2009)”

  6. “where he walks through how he actually turned mov into a machine. It's very weird and interesting!”

    Walkthrough of how mov was turned into a full machine

    ianbicking, 2019-01 · Recommendation · in “Movfuscator – Single instruction C compiler”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: movfuscator, x86, reverse engineering, turing completeness, obfuscation

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