

And the really bad news: There are a lot of different ways to impede discovery. And by dint of them being a disassembler team, they know a good many of them. So if you're really intent on disassembling this, you will need to either (i) get lucky (e.g.

by finding "the answer" on the Internet, which you're already trying), or (ii) be very persistent, tenacious, and disciplined. Reverse engineering is inherently hard, like untangling a tight knot, even in the best case. Start the easiest way: Use a different disassembler. Competitors aren't likely to care if you disassemble hopper. Hypothesize defenses and experiment with ways to defeat them. One technique they may be using is hashing various byte sequences within their own executable, then looking for such sequences when they disassemble. You may be able to subvert this by divide and conquer: e.g. by creating copies of the executable that are slices out of the original. You will probably need to know what the proper executable format is and conform your slices to that, so that you're not presenting it an apparently random sequence of bytes, but something that is plausibly an executable. On those pieces you might try varying degrees of fuzzing (i.e. You will need an automated testing rig for this, because the number of variations you are likely to need to test to get positive results is very large. This would be like decoding the genome by decoding pieces of it at a time.ĭo what virus-hunters do.
HOPPER DISASSEMBLER LICENSE KEY CODE
Follow the hopper code execution instruction by instruction from its very first instruction executed. This can be done in a machine code simulator, a step-by-step instruction debugger, or by hand. It's tedious, painstaking, and can require a fair number of tools or a lot of patience. But suss out how the program loads up and establishes its beachhead. This can also be combined with the slicing approach once you know a snippet of the hopper bootstrap, slice that into a hypothesized short executable and see if hopper recognizes it. If it does, start fuzzing some of the value (either in the executable format/framing, or in the bootstrap sequence).
