The handlers themselves are obfuscated with junk code, dead stores, and arithmetic mutations.
VMP3-Disasm is an experimental disassembler for x86 binaries virtualized by VMProtect 3. Unlike NoVmp, this project attempts to lift VMP's virtual machine handlers into an intermediate language purely through instruction emulation using the Triton symbolic execution framework. vmprotect reverse engineering
A handler is a small snippet of native assembly code designed to execute a single virtual instruction. For example, there are specific handlers for virtual addition, virtual bitwise operations, memory reads/writes, and conditional jumps. The handlers themselves are obfuscated with junk code,
For simpler VMProtect configurations that don't use full virtualization, you can sometimes "unpack" the binary by setting breakpoints on functions like VirtualProtect to find the original entry point (OEP) and dump the code. Key Challenges Part II: Unpacking a VMProtected Kernel Driver - eversinc33 A handler is a small snippet of native
[ Triage & Detection ] ➔ [ Unpacking / Dump ] ➔ [ IAT Reconstruction ] ➔ [ De-virtualization ] Stage 1: Triage and Detection
The approach follows four steps:
The core mechanism of VMProtect is its virtual machine (VM). During the protection process, the compiler picks targeted functions and translates their native x86/x64 assembly instructions into a custom, non-standard bytecode. This bytecode cannot be executed directly by the CPU.