From game mods to obfuscation
I started learning reverse engineering nineteen years ago, when I got interested in modding games. Back then most games were 32-bit x86, and my most-used tool was OllyDbg.
There were no great decompilers in those days — no pressing F5 and reading C. If you wanted to understand a program, you had to be comfortable reading thousands of lines of assembly. In fact, all my own coding was done in x86 assembly (MASM).
Many of those games were protected against reverse engineering with tools like UPX, ASProtect, ASPack, Themida and VMProtect — and that made me curious about the protections themselves.
I found myself single-stepping through a sea of obfuscated junk code, and even though that would drive most people mad, I liked it. I fell in love with it. My interest shifted from modding games to code obfuscation: I started analyzing protections, documenting how they worked, and building tools to help me take them apart.
Why we built Dhaedalida
That is why we built Dhaedalida. We believe that to build a good software protector, you must have spent years on the other side, analyzing protections. We know which complications slow attackers down and what genuinely annoys them — because it used to annoy us.
What we believe
An unbreakable protection is impossible on a system that is fully under the user's control. The purpose of code obfuscation and virtualization is to deter the average reverser or cracker by making analysis so slow and painful that they eventually give up. A plain "invalid license" string is trivial to find, and a single jz/jnz patch is all it takes to turn a failed check into a valid one — protection is what turns that afternoon patch into weeks of skilled effort.
We also know that with enough time, patience and skill, a good reverse engineer will defeat any protection. Public analyses get published; unpackers, devirtualizers and scripts get released. That is why we believe in constant updates: a protector cannot ship one update a year while public tooling against it is already circulating — especially in the age of LLMs, when attackers iterate faster than ever. Defenders have to adapt just as fast. It is a cat-and-mouse game, and we intend to keep running.
— The founder of Dhaedalida