Alex realized he couldn't fully de-virtualize the code. It was too mutated. He had to emulate it. He copied the relevant chunk of memory—the bytecode and the VM context—into a local emulator he built on his host machine.
VMProtect transforms this into:
Alex wrote a script to set a hardware breakpoint on the memory location where the port number was calculated. He restarted the protected binary. As the program initialized, his breakpoint hit. vmprotect reverse engineering
He was in. The VMProtect shield, the "Unbreakable," lay in pieces on his hard drive—a collection of mapped handlers and lifted pseudocode. It had taken him four days without sleep, but the fortress had a door, and he had found the key. Alex realized he couldn't fully de-virtualize the code