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

Adrian Crenshaw · 80.9K views · 2015-09-25 · 46:19

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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

Recommended by 6 HN people across 7 months · HN mentions 2017–2026

Topics

Security & hackingCompilers, interpreters & program analysisComputability & complexity theory
Search by tags
movfuscatorx86reverse engineeringturing completenessobfuscation

What people said

MattSteelblade · 2026-08 · Strong recommendation

I cannot wait for the accompanying Black Hat talk. Christopher Domas is one of my absolute favorite all-time hackers. He does such a fantastic job of explaining his work. Some of my favorite talks of his: - Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering [LINK] - The MoVfuscator [VIDEO] - Hardware Backdoors in redacted x86 [LINK]

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mk_stjames · 2025-09 · Strong recommendation

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

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azalemeth · 2023-11 · Strong recommendation

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 ;-)

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Sources

Video by Adrian Crenshaw, played through YouTube.

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