garble/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

v0.11.0 - 2023-12-02

This release drops support for Go 1.20, continues support for Go 1.21, and adds initial support for the upcoming Go 1.22.

@lu4p and @mvdan improved the code using SSA to detect which types are used with reflection, which should fix a number of errors such as cannot use T1 as T2 or cannot convert T1 to T2. See: #685, #763, #782, #785, #807.

@pagran added experimental support for control flow obfuscation, which should provide stronger obfuscation of function bodies when enabled. See the documentation at docs/CONTROLFLOW.md. See #462.

A number of bugfixes are also included:

• Avoid panicking on a struct embedding a builtin alias - #798
• Strip struct field tags when hashing struct types for type identity - #801

v0.10.1 - 2023-06-25

This bugfix release continues support for Go 1.20 and the upcoming 1.21, and features:

• Avoid obfuscating local types used for reflection, like in go-spew - #765

v0.10.0 - 2023-06-05

This release drops support for Go 1.19, continues support for Go 1.20, and adds initial support for the upcoming Go 1.21.

@lu4p rewrote the code to detect whether reflect is used on each Go type, which is used to decide which Go types should not be obfuscated to prevent breakage. The old code analyzed syntax trees with type information, which is cheap but clumsy. The new code uses SSA, which adds a bit of CPU cost to builds, but allows for a more powerful analysis that is less likely to break on edge cases. While this change does slow down builds slightly, we will start using SSA for more features in the near term, such as control flow obfuscation. See #732.

@pagran improved the patching of Go's linker to also obfuscate funcInfo.entryoff, making it harder to relate a function's metadata with its body in the binary. See #641.

@mvdan rewrote garble's caching to be more robust, avoiding errors such as "cannot load garble export file". The new caching system is entirely separate from Go's GOCACHE, being placed in GARBLE_CACHE, which defaults to a directory such as ~/.cache/garble. See #708.

@DominicBreuker taught -literals to support obfuscating large string literals by using the "simple" obfuscator on them, as it runs in linear time. See #720.

@mvdan added support for garble run, the obfuscated version of go run, to quickly test that a main program still works when obfuscated. See #661.

A number of bugfixes are also included:

• Ensure that sync/atomic types are still aligned by the compiler - #686
• Print the chosen random seed when using -seed=random - #696
• Avoid errors in git apply if the system language isn't English - #698
• Avoid a panic when importing a missing package - #694
• Suggest a command when asking the user to rebuild garble - #739

v0.9.3 - 2023-02-12

This bugfix release continues support for Go 1.19 and 1.20, and features:

• Support inline comments in assembly to fix GOARCH=ppc64 - #672
• Avoid obfuscating reflect.Value to fix davecgh/go-spew - #676
• Fix runtime panics when using garble build inside a VCS directory - #675

v0.9.2 - 2023-02-07

This bugfix release continues support for Go 1.19 and 1.20, and features:

• Support go:linkname directives referencing methods - #656
• Fix more "unused import" errors with -literals - #658

v0.9.1 - 2023-01-26

This bugfix release continues support for Go 1.19 and the upcoming Go 1.20, and features:

• Support obfuscating code which uses "dot imports" - #610
• Fix linking errors for MIPS architectures - #646
• Compiler intrinsics for packages like math/bits work again - #655

v0.9.0 - 2023-01-17

This release continues support for Go 1.19 and the upcoming Go 1.20.

Noteworthy changes include:

• Randomize the magic number header in pclntab - #622
• Further reduce binary sizes with -tiny by 4% - #633
• Reduce the size overhead of all builds by 2% - #629
• Reduce the binary size overhead of -literals by 20% - #637
• Support assembly references to the current package name - #619
• Support package paths with periods in assembly - #621

Note that the first two changes are done by patching and rebuilding Go's linker. While this adds complexity, it enables more link time obfuscation.

v0.8.0 - 2022-12-15

This release drops support for Go 1.18, continues support for Go 1.19, and adds initial support for the upcoming Go 1.20.

Noteworthy changes include:

• GOGARBLE=* is now the default to obfuscate all packages - #594
• GOPRIVATE is no longer used, being deprecated in v0.5.0
• Obfuscate assembly source code filenames - #605
• Randomize the lengths of obfuscated names
• Support obfuscating time and syscall
• Avoid reflect method call panics if reflect is obfuscated

v0.7.2 - 2022-09-26

This bugfix release continues support for Go 1.18 and 1.19 and features:

• Fix an edge case resulting in bad syntax due to comments - #573
• Avoid a panic involving generic code - #577
• Obfuscate Go names in assembly header files - #553
• Support garble reverse on packages using cgo or assembly - #555

v0.7.1 - 2022-08-02

This bugfix release finishes support for Go 1.19 and features:

• Obfuscate all cgo filenames to not leak import paths
• Support obfuscating net and runtime/debug
• Don't leak temporary directories after obfuscating
• Fix an edge case resulting in broken import declarations
• Reduce allocations involved in obfuscating code

v0.7.0 - 2022-06-10

This release drops support for Go 1.17, continues support for Go 1.18, and adds initial support for the upcoming Go 1.19.

Noteworthy changes include:

• Initial support for obfuscating generic code - #414
• Remove unused imports in -literals more reliably - #481
• Support obfuscating package paths ending with .go - #539
• Support installing garble in paths containing spaces - #544
• Avoid a panic when obfuscating variadic functions - #524
• Avoid a "refusing to list package" panic in garble test - #522
• Some module builds are now used as regression tests - #240

v0.6.0 - 2022-03-22

This release adds support for Go 1.18 while continuing support for Go 1.17.x. Note that building generic code isn't supported just yet.

Noteworthy changes include:

• Obfuscation is now fully deterministic with a fixed -seed - #449
• Improve support for type aliases to fix some build failures - #466
• Add support for quotes in -ldflags as per go help build - #492
• Fail if the current Go version is newer than what built garble - #269
• Various optimizations resulting in builds being up to 5% faster - #456

v0.5.1 - 2022-01-18

This bugfix release features:

• Obfuscate exported names in main packages
• Fix build errors when using -literals with GOGARBLE=*
• Avoid breaking -ldflags=-X when -literals is used
• Avoid link errors when using -debugdir
• Speed up obfuscating the runtime package

v0.5.0 - 2022-01-06

This release of Garble adds initial support for the upcoming Go 1.18, continues support for Go 1.17.x, and drops support for Go 1.16.x. Note that building generic code isn't supported just yet.

Two breaking changes are introduced:

• Deprecate the use of GOPRIVATE in favor of GOGARBLE (see https://github.com/burrowers/garble/issues/276)
• garble reverse now requires a main package argument

Noteworthy changes include:

• Improve detection of reflect usage even further
• Support obfuscating some more standard library packages
• Improve literal obfuscation by using constant folding
• Add the -debug flag to log details of the obfuscated build
• Ensure the runtime package is built in a reproducible way
• Obfuscate local variable names to prevent shadowing bugs
• Fix and test support for using garble on 32-bit hosts

v0.4.0 - 2021-08-26

This release of Garble adds support for Go 1.17.x while maintaining support for Go 1.16.x. A few other noteworthy changes are included:

• Support obfuscating literals in more edge cases with -literals
• Improve detection of reflect usage with standard library APIs
• Names exported for cgo are no longer obfuscated
• Avoid breaking consts using iota with -literals

Known bugs:

• obfuscating the entire standard library with GOPRIVATE=* is not well supported yet

v0.3.0 - 2021-05-31

This release of Garble fixes a number of bugs and improves existing features, while maintaining support for Go 1.16.x. Notably:

• Make builds reproducible even when cleaning GOCACHE
• Detecting types used with reflection is more reliable
• Cross builds with GOPRIVATE=* are now supported
• Support conversion between struct types from different packages
• Improve support for type aliases
• Function names used with go:linkname are now obfuscated
• garble reverse can now reverse field names and lone filenames

Known bugs:

• obfuscating the entire standard library with GOPRIVATE=* is not well supported yet

v0.2.0 - 2021-04-08

This release of Garble drops support for Go 1.15.x, which is necessary for some of the enhancements below:

• New: garble test allows running Go tests built with obfuscation
• New: garble reverse allows de-obfuscating output like stack traces
• Names of functions implemented in assembly are now obfuscated
• GOPRIVATE=* now works with packages like crypto/tls and embed
• garble build can now be used with many main packages at once
• -literals is more robust and now works on all of std

The README is also overhauled to be more helpful to first-time users.

Known bugs:

• obfuscating the entire standard library with GOPRIVATE=* is not well supported yet

v0.1.0 - 2021-03-05

This is the first release of Garble. It supports Go 1.15.x and 1.16.x.

It ships all the major features that have worked for the past year, including:

• Obfuscation of all names, except methods and reflect targets
• Obfuscation of package import paths and position information
• Stripping of build and module information
• Support for Go modules
• Reproducible and cacheable builds
• Stripping of extra information via -tiny
• Literal obfuscation via -literals

Known bugs:

• obfuscating the standard library with GOPRIVATE=* is not well supported yet
• garble test is temporarily disabled, as it is currently broken