Decompiling a compiled C program

grob115 · 07-07-2013, 01:11 PM

Hi, thought once a C / C++ program has been compiled, it's difficult to reverse compile it to source like in Java or C#. However, this article appears to point to the contrary.
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2012/05/...-shell-script/

Any ideas? It appears the program "shc" just converts bash functions to C code, and use gcc to compile it into executable. So how easy is it to reverse compile this?

grob115 · 07-07-2013, 01:14 PM

Okay just read here....

Quote:

shc itself is not a compiler such as cc, it rather encodes
and encrypts a shell script and generates C source code with
the added expiration capability. It then uses the system
compiler to compile a stripped binary which behaves exactly
like the original script. Upon execution, the compiled
binary will decrypt and execute the code with the shell -c
option. Unfortunatelly, it will not give you any speed
improvement as a real C program would.

Lantzvillian · 07-09-2013, 04:29 PM

A compiled C program isn't all that difficult to reverse for those that work in the industry of reverse engineering... and some very talented people can also look at asm and see whats going on for the most part without debuggers or tools.