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A comment on Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation (Part 1). Parent comment

Re:Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation (Part 1) by bitexploder on Saturday December 24, 2022 @10:18AM (#34117572)
I am really failing to understand the distinction here. Encryption with say, AES has very different properties and use cases compared to an obfuscation scheme. You can use encryption as a part of an obfuscation scheme, but obfuscation is a shell game, all the way down. Crypto is not, mathematically. They are categorically different things, right?
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Re:Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation (Part 1) by grog454 on Saturday December 24, 2022 @10:53AM (#34117933)
The math is irrelevant when the key is known to all parties.
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Re:Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation (Part 1) by bitexploder on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:11AM (#34118129)
Sure. That is DRM and obfuscation in a nutshell. How annoying can I make this for you to reverse engineer?
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Re:Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation (Part 1) by toast0 on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:17AM (#34118213)
Obfuscation with encryption can be done with good ciphers, like AES, but the key is still shipped with the code, so it's still just cat and mouse.

It's a little different if the key is hardware specific, so each binary only runs on one system and it's hard to extract the keys, but that's not a typical setup. Usually it's this code needs to run on the general public's computers or phones, and that's too general a target to rely on hardware crypto.

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Re:Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation (Part 1) by matmann2001 on Saturday December 24, 2022 @01:55PM (#34119895)
The key specifier word was "whitebox". They aren't speaking generally about cryptography.
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