Show HN: Compile C to Not Gates
6 hours ago (github.com)
Hi! I've been working on the flipjump project, a programming language with 1 opcode: flip (invert) a bit, then jump (unconditionally). So a bit-flip followed by more bit-flips. It's effectively a bunch of NOT gates. This language, as poor as it sounds, is RICH.
Today I completed my compiler from C to FlipJump. It takes C files, and compiles them into flipjump. I finished testing it all today, and it works! My key interest in this project is to stretch what we know of computing and to prove that anything can be done even with minimal power.
I appreciate you reading my announcement, and be happy to answer questions.
More links:
- The flipjump language: https://github.com/tomhea/flip-jump https://esolangs.org/wiki/FlipJump
- c2fj python package https://pypi.org/project/c2fj/
Reminds me of movfuscator [1]. This can compile programs to movs and only movs.
[1] https://github.com/Battelle/movfuscator
Battelle is great. They also created some software called Cantor Dust [1] that turns files into images to allow humans to easily spot obfuscated data or files.
The sad thing about this kind of work, because I love it, is that to get paid to do it you need clearances and polygraphs and periodic reinvestigations/continuous monitoring and all sorts of things that I find unpleasant.
[1] https://github.com/Battelle/cantordust
I'm not sure what you mean but I was a security researcher for a large company for a bit and required none of that. I was required to work airgapped at home, however.
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Agreed that is a fine piece of work. But the author is Chris Domas. Which is plain from the repo readme, but it’d be clearer to link to his repo.
I was originally going to link their repo [1]. But I saw it was forked from the one I linked so I just gave that one instead.
[1] https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator
Am I right in deducing that this language gets its power from self-modifying code? I.e. flipping bits within addresses of the opcodes of the running program?
You are indeed right
I would have expected the language documentation to focus more on this observation and to explain for instance how self modification is used to implement while loops. But I don't even see the term mentioned anywhere?!
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Ah interesting.. wonder if you can model this with a recursively expanded algebraic expression. I've been thinking lately along similar lines about polynomials that encode pushdown automata, so this is cool to see.
If you have an answer I'd be happy to hear it!
I wonder if someone has already made a Reverse Engineering CTF challenge for this concept.
I read it as reverse engineering WTF challenge... cool stuff though, seriously.
There actually was one with subleq: https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.attify.com/flare-4-ctf-wri...
I would also be very curious to see if it's possible to make a decompiler for this type of obfuscated program.
There is also a brainfuck to flipjump compiler: https://github.com/tomhea/bf2fj
Ah, the convenience of brainfuck with the performance of flipjump. Excellent.
Looking forward to the poor security researcher who gets to reverse engineer some malware sample they compiles this into for obfuscation... Its going to be an interesting blog post.
Maxim (now owned by Analog) actually manufactures a single-instruction processor series, called MAXQ. It uses a single move instruction, with a flag for literals, and a transport triggered architecture.
By the way, as a challenge, try how you can program an "If" statement in Flipjump.
How is a jump realized by Not Gates?
I dont think that the jump can be realized by NOT gates, but it's essentially "where to find the next NOT command". The jump is indeed a crucial part of the language, as it allows going back, and especially to make self-modifying code.
I'm guessing by not jumping into a terminating/ halting NOOP.
The logic is within the branching.
AND, OR, NOT - pick 2
NOR - pick 1
Id appreciate more explanations from the power of combined bitflip & goto
Sure!
https://github.com/tomhea/flip-jump/wiki/Learn-FlipJump
This will let you understand how to implement the very basic "if" in flipjump.
I tried to make it as easy for newcomers, but please feel free and update me if something is written complicated.
After you understand up to the macros, you can try yourself to understand the xor macro, which most of the library is built based on it: https://github.com/tomhea/flip-jump/blob/fe51448932e78db7d76...
Looks like we banned you and this domain because of the egregious vote manipulation and bogus comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34856792.
That was a long time ago, though, and the project is interesting enough, so I'm going to assume you've learned your lesson and unban you. Please stop using multiple accounts for this though!
Thanks man, I appreciate it.
Dang, I have to know what triggered you to say this. It’s not the same user account so you would have had to have recognized the URL and written based on that.
Do you keep notes on each astroturfed submission and auto-trigger reposts to notify yourself? Or did you just happen to recognize this? 20 minutes from his post to your comment is absurdly good moderation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34856792 was, let's call it, the original sin in this chain of woe. It was also pretty obvious that the other submitting accounts were all related. Since the project itself is interesting I figured the best thing to do was give the submitter a second chance, so I picked the earlier post from today (the OP) and swapped it out for the other one (42742462).
I hope that answers your question!
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