cytown / garble

Obfuscate Go builds

garble

GO111MODULE=on go get mvdan.cc/garble

Obfuscate a Go build. Requires Go 1.13 or later.

garble build [build flags] [packages]

See garble -h for up to date usage information.

Purpose

Produce a binary that works as well as a regular build, but that has as little information about the original source code as possible.

The tool is designed to be:

• Coupled with cmd/go, to support both GOPATH and modules with ease
• Deterministic and reproducible, given the same initial source code
• Reversible given the original source, to un-garble panic stack traces

Mechanism

The tool wraps calls to the Go compiler to transform the Go source code, in order to:

• Replace as many useful identifiers as possible with short base64 hashes
• Remove module build information
• Strip filenames and unnecessary lines, to make position info less useful

It also wraps calls to the linker in order to:

• Enforce the -s flag, to not include the symbol table
• Enforce the -w flag, to not include DWARF debugging data

Finally, the tool requires the use of the -trimpath build flag, to ensure the binary doesn't include paths from the current filesystem.

Options

By default, the tool garbles the packages under the current module. If not running in module mode, then only the main package is garbled. To specify what packages to garble, set GOPRIVATE, documented at go help module-private.

Caveats

Most of these can improve with time and effort. The purpose of this section is to document the current shortcomings of this tool.

• Package import path names are never garbled, since we require the original paths for the build system to work. See #13 to investigate alternatives.

• The -a flag for go build is required, since -toolexec doesn't work well with the build cache; see golang/go#27628.

• Since no caching at all can take place right now (see the link above), fast incremental builds aren't possible. Large projects might be slow to build.

• Deciding what method names to garble is always going to be difficult, due to interfaces that could be implemented up or down the package import tree. At the moment, exported methods are never garbled.

• Similarly to methods, exported struct fields are difficult to garble, as the names might be relevant for reflection work like encoding/json. At the moment, exported methods are never garbled.

• Functions implemented outside Go, such as assembly, aren't garbled since we currently only transform the input Go source.

• Since garble forces -trimpath, plugins built with -garble must be loaded from Go programs built with -trimpath too.