How can I obfuscate an EXE file? - c++

I have an EXE file. It comes from a Qt C++ Visual Studio project.
I would like to obfuscate this EXE.
The main reason is that my URLs (for version files, API etc.) that I use in the program and any other strings can be easily edited with a HeX editor.
Thanks for your help.

I used UPX packer and it works well.

You can easily reverse UPX Packer. With the -d Option !
Semantic Design might be interesting.
For DLLS you can try : https://freeobfuscator.com/
But i am also looking for a better one.

Related

How to run an exe in linux?

suppose I have a .exe file and i want it to run in Linux without using wine tool.
i want to convert PE->ELF.
can anyone help how to programatically do this?
Thanks,
Sujitha.kv
You essentially need to strip all the interesting code parts from the EXE, but none of the PE specific information and then re-assemble and re-link the code into an ELF file. This will require some reverse engineering and a lot of manual work.
This would be very difficult, so I suggest you simply use WINE.
it's not possible cause it's a totally different OS!
the only way is to make it run through a program like Wine

Read multiple files

I'm new to c++ and am trying to alter the console app code posted below to read multiple files, ideally using a wildcard extension. Can some please give me some pointers..?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms916815#odc_wssusageeventlogging_examiningtheusagelogfileformat
-----------Edit-------
What I need is how to change the code above instead of pointing it to a specific [filename.log] point it to a directory name and let it process all the log files in that directory.
--------------Tools-----
Win32 Console Application project in Visual Studio 2010 in C++
[To be run on win 32 bit platform]
Using Win32 APIs you can list the files in a directory by following this example. From there it should be relatively trivial for you to incorporate that code into your application to allow you to process multiple files as requested.
Specifically the FindFirstFile API allows for wildcard when search for files.
If you're willing to use the boost library check out
this post. If you're using something like C++/CLI then there is support in .NET for this as well (I'm assuming for now you're not using C++/CLI). If you specify the tools at your disposal maybe you can get a more directed answer.

Building a C/C++ project without using Makefiles

I have a project containing C/C++ files. I'd like to build it without using make. What are my options? I'd like cross platform solutions if possible.
I've used SCons and it is very good.
SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.
I've also looked at cmake but have not seriously used it.
Well, you're always going to need some way to invoke the compiler. If it's a trivial project, you can usually just stick all the .C filenames on the command line of the compiler and get some kind of output.
Or you can use a batch file / shell script instead of a makefile, but it would be less 'cross-platform' than a makefile and much less useful.
You should probably explain your motivations more clearly.
Since you're going to use Boost anyways (right?) Boost.Jam might be an option.
I already used WAF in some of my projects and it worked out quite well.
If you are familiar with python...
A common alternative is to write python scripts to compile your code.
How are you editing you code? Can that system also build it for you?
Visual Studio, Eclipse, XCode, KDevelop? :-)

Port Visual Studio C++ to Linux

We have a not very complicated but big (i.e. lots of files) Visual Studio C++ Win32 Console written in C++0x standard in VS2010.
It does not use any non standard code or anything (Hopefully!).
I now wanna port it to Linux.
Which way is the quickest way to do it?
autoconf?
old-fashioned make file?
any other solution?
I would use regular make but keep it simple with default rules as much as possible. Add in dependencies as you go along.
EDIT: As in interim step, build it with mingw so that you can avoid the whole API porting issue until you have a working build in your new build mechanism.
If your console app calls win32 API functions then you have a choice between modifying all the source where it is used or writing a module that implements those functions.
In prior porting efforts of this type I tried it both ways and the latter was easier. I ended up writing only about 18 to 20 shim functions.
It was successful enough that I ended up writing an OS abstraction layer that was used on many projects that simply let me compile on Windows native, cygwin, Linux, VxWorks, etc. with trivial changes to one or two files.
(p.s. Any interest in an open source version of a C++ based OS abstraction layer? I was thinking of releasing an unencumbered version of it to the world if there's sufficient interest. It's mostly useful where BOOST is too heavy -- i.e. embedded projects.)
Most probably you don't need autoconf (and I suggest you don't touch it, unless you love pain), because you are not trying to be portable to a dozen of Unix flavours.
Roll your Makefiles manually. It shouldn't be too difficult if you have a set of shared rules and have minimal Makefiles that just specify source files and compile options.
Use GCC 4.5 as it supports more C++0x features.
You can export a make file from Visual Studio.
Update: Actually you can't anymore, unless you have VC6 lying around
STAY AWAY FROM AUTO* and configure. These are horrible IMHO.
If you can somehow get a VS 8 or 9 vcproj/sln, you can use this. I have not used it, so I can't give any advice.
If you're up to manual conversion, I would suggest something like CMake, as it's pretty easy to get ready fast enough, even for large projects.
If the project has a simple layout, you could have success using Qt 4's qmake like this:
qmake -project
It will output a qmake .pro file, which can be converted into a makefile on many platforms (using qmake). This should work okay, but not perfectly. Alternatively, you can install the Qt plugin for VS, and let it generate the pro file from an existing VS project. It will make your build system depend on Qt4's qmake, which is probably not what you want.
There are of course other things like cmake, but they will all require manual intervention.
The fastest way to do it?
g++ *.cpp -o myapp
Seriously, depending on your needs, even generating a makefile might be overkill. If you're just interested in a quick and dirty "let's see if we can get a working program on Linux", just throw your code files at g++ and see what happens.

How do I zip a directory of files using C++?

I'm working on a project using C++, Boost, and Qt. I understand how to compress single files and bytestreams using, for example, the qCompress() function in Qt.
How do I zip a directory of multiple files, including subdirectories? I am looking for a cross-platform (Mac, Win, Linux) solution; I'd prefer not to fire off a bunch of new processes.
Is there a standard way to combine bytestreams from multiple files into a zipped archive, or maybe there is a convenience function or method that would be available in the Boost iostream library?
Many thanks for the assistance.
Update: The QuaZip library looks really great. There is an example in the download package (in the "tests" dir) that shows very clearly how to zip up a directory of files.
Update 2: After completing this task on my Linux build environment, I discovered that QuaZip doesn't work at all with the Visual Studio compiler. It may be possible to tackle all those compiler errors, but a word of caution to anyone looking down this path.
I have found the following two libraries:
ZipIOS++. Seems to be "pure" C++. They don't list Windows explicitly as a supported platform. So i think you should try your luck yourself.
QuaZIP. Based on Qt4. Actually looks nice. They list Windows explicitly (Using mingw). Apparently, it is a C++ wrapper for [this] library.
Ah, and of course, i have ripped those sites from this Qt Mailinglist question about Zipping/Unzipping of directories :)
Just for the record...
Today, I needed to do something very similar in Visual C++. (Though wanted to maintain the possibility to compile the project on other platforms; however preferred not to adopt Qt just for this purpose.)
Ended up using the Minizip library. It is written in plain C, but devising a simple C++ wrapper around it was a breeze, and the end result works great, at least for my purposes.
I have built a wrapper around minizip adding some features that I needed and making it nicer to use it. Is does use the latest c++11 and is developed using Visual Studio 2013, so it should work out-of-the-box for you.
There's a full description here: https://github.com/sebastiandev/zipper
you can zip entire folders, streams, vectors, etc. Also a nice feature is doing everything entirely in memory.
Poco::Zip is also a choice, it has clearly documentation and some code for demo.
Poco::Zip Document
system("zip myarchive.zip *");
I tried QuaZIP 0.4.3 on Windows with VisualStudio 2010 -- there are still issues but can be resolved easily.
To build with VS:
Use CMake to configure and generate VS solution for QuaZIP.
Open soltion with VS and build -- you'll first notice that it can't find 'zlib.h'.
Open preferences for quazip project and add path to Qt's copy of Zlib to C/C++->General->Additional Include Directories: $(QTDIR)/src/3rdparty/zlib.
Rebuild again and you'll get lots of warnings and one error C2491: dllimport static issue on QuaZipFile::staticMetaObject.
This is because QuaZipFile is declared like "class QUAZIP_EXPORT QuaZipFile" and QUAZIP_EXPORT needs to resolve to Q_DECL_EXPORT for dll and to Q_DECL_IMPORT for application, based on whether QUAZIP_BUILD is defined or not. When building QuaZIP QUAZIP_BUILD should be defined but isn't -- configuration process defines in error completely useless "quazip_EXPORTS" instead.
To fix, just remove "quazip_EXPORTS" from all build configurations and add QUAZIP_BUILD instead -- QuaZIP will now build fine.