3 ms·
Things were definitely much simpler a couple years ago.
by iampims 6y ago
Things were definitely much simpler a couple years ago.
- bri3d 6y agoI'm actually a bit surprised it's taken as long as it has for mobile obfuscation to catch up. Both on the Android bytecode and the iOS native code side there are obvious PC analogs in the form of .NET obfuscators for MSIL and packers and game DRM for native code. Of course, the Obj-C runtime throws a little wrench into things on iOS, making it a bit of a hybrid - but the approaches are still similar. It's still an ultimately pointless cat and mouse game as long as an attacker can trace the hardware (and with full-platform emulation tools like Corellium, this capability is unlikely to go away soon), but still an amusing one to watch.
- dylz 6y agoI've seen this for _years_ already - it might also be because of a bit of an app usage difference, where the people that typically do these writeups or browse HN don't install the shitware on the app stores that do these things, except for rare common cases like large communications platforms (Snap) Many Asian mobile games run malware DRM like this - https://www.wellbia.com/home/en/pages/xigncode3-for-android/ https://www.wellbia.com/home/en/pages/xigncode3-for-android/ They are incredibly invasive and insecure, exfiltrate tons of PII (location, private IP, mac, ...) where possible unencrypted to bare IPs in various countries. This company in particular also has a PC-based anticheat rootkit that doesn't prevent cheating and allows the developer to "remote control the user", which is also an advertised feature.