uCc: untyped (or micro) C compiler

uCc is a small C compiler which presents the idea of type-flattening obfuscation. Its objectives is to make the type reconstruction from binary code hard. You may try to decompile¹ some obfuscated object files in demo to see the effect on function signatures.

uCc compiles with Rust >= 1.40.0 and is tested on Linux.

Compilation

cargo check
cargo test

and installation (optional)

cargo install --path .

Otherwise, ucc can be used in the project's folder with

cargo run --

Usage

ucc --help (or cargo run -- --help)

Positional arguments:
  src          source code file

Optional arguments:
  -h, --help   print usage
  -o output    output object file
  -l           lightweight obfuscation
  -w level     heavyweight obfuscation (default: 0)
  -v           verbose
  -f function  function to jit
  -j           jit

Example

• Obfuscate the strlen function:

ucc demo/slen.c -o slen_flat.o

• The IR code can be observed with -v option:

ucc demo/slen.c -o slen_flat.o -v

• The mode JIT² can be used to see immediately the machine code, the function to jit must be specified:

ucc demo/slen.c -j -f slen

• Sometimes, the obfuscated code is too verbose⁴ then Hex-Rays may complain "too big function" (other decompilers like Ghidra or JEB have no such limit), then the mode lightweight can be used. In this mode, most of obfuscation transformations are removed:

ucc demo/slen.c -o slen_light.o -l

• The mode heavyweight can be enabled to generate harder to reverse machine codes.

ucc demo/slen -o slen_heavy.o -w 3

Notes

• The compiler is in development, in the current state it lacks many features³ of a full C compiler, for example it can generate object files only, executable is not yet possible. If you want to run the file, please link it using a C compiler:

// create a main.c
#include <stdio.h>

extern int slen(char *s);

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
	char *hello = "hello world";
	printf("len = %d\n", slen(hello));
}

// compile and link with the obfuscated slen_flat.o
gcc main.c slen_flat.o -o slen

// then run
./slen
len = 11

• The compiler is probabilistic, it generates a different but computationally equivalent output each time invoked.

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¹ Some decent decompilers: Hex-Rays (which provides an evaluation), Ghidra, JEB, etc.

² In some Linux distro with SELinux, JIT is forbidden because of W^X protection, this can be temporarily disabled using sudo setenforce 0.

³ There is still no pre-processing so include, define, macro, etc. do not work yet, neither comments in source codes. Please look at examples in tests and demo for the kind of programs that uCc currently support.

⁴ This is an unwanted effect, putting unnecessary noise into the machine code is not the goal of uCc.