# garble
GO111MODULE=on go get mvdan.cc/garble
Obfuscate Go code by wrapping the Go toolchain. Requires Go 1.15 or later, since
Go 1.14 uses an entirely different object format.
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:
initial support for build caching (#142)
As per the discussion in https://github.com/golang/go/issues/41145, it
turns out that we don't need special support for build caching in
-toolexec. We can simply modify the behavior of "[...]/compile -V=full"
and "[...]/link -V=full" so that they include garble's own version and
options in the printed build ID.
The part of the build ID that matters is the last, since it's the
"content ID" which is used to work out whether there is a need to redo
the action (build) or not. Since cmd/go parses the last word in the
output as "buildID=...", we simply add "+garble buildID=_/_/_/${hash}".
The slashes let us imitate a full binary build ID, but we assume that
the other components such as the action ID are not necessary, since the
only reader here is cmd/go and it only consumes the content ID.
The reported content ID includes the tool's original content ID,
garble's own content ID from the built binary, and the garble options
which modify how we obfuscate code. If any of the three changes, we
should use a different build cache key. GOPRIVATE also affects caching,
since a different GOPRIVATE value means that we might have to garble a
different set of packages.
Include tests, which mainly check that 'garble build -v' prints package
lines when we expect to always need to rebuild packages, and that it
prints nothing when we should be reusing the build cache even when the
built binary is missing.
After this change, 'go test' on Go 1.15.2 stabilizes at about 8s on my
machine, whereas it used to be at around 25s before.
4 years ago
* Coupled with `cmd/go` , to support modules and build caching
* 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 and linker to transform the Go build, in
order to:
* Replace as many useful identifiers as possible with short base64 hashes
* Replace package paths with short base64 hashes
* Remove all [build ](https://golang.org/pkg/runtime/#Version ) and [module ](https://golang.org/pkg/runtime/debug/#ReadBuildInfo ) information
* Strip filenames and shuffle position information
* Strip debugging information and symbol tables
* Obfuscate literals, if the `-literals` flag is given
* Removes [extra information ](#tiny-mode ) if the `-tiny` flag is given
### 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.
* Exported methods are never garbled at the moment, since they could
be required by interfaces and reflection. This area is a work in progress.
* Functions implemented outside Go, such as assembly, aren't garbled since we
currently only transform the input Go source.
* Go plugins are not currently supported; see [#87 ](https://github.com/burrowers/garble/issues/87 ).
* There are cases where garble is a little too agressive with obfuscation, this may lead to identifiers getting obfuscated which are needed for reflection, e.g. to parse JSON into a struct; see [#162 ](https://github.com/burrowers/garble/issues/162 ). To work around this you can pass a hint to garble, that an type is used for reflection via passing it to `reflect.TypeOf` or `reflect.ValueOf` in the same file:
```go
// this is used for parsing json
type Message struct {
Command string
Args string
}
// never obfuscate the Message type
var _ = reflect.TypeOf(Message{})
```
### Tiny Mode
When the `-tiny` flag is passed, extra information is stripped from the resulting
Go binary. This includes line numbers, filenames, and code in the runtime the
prints panics, fatal errors, and trace/debug info. All in all this can make binaries
6-10% smaller in our testing.
Note: if `-tiny` is passed, no panics, fatal errors will ever be printed, but they can
still be handled internally with `recover` as normal. In addition, the `GODEBUG`
environmental variable will be ignored.
### Contributing
We actively seek new contributors, if you would like to contribute to garble use the
[CONTRIBUTING.md ](CONTRIBUTING.md ) as a starting point.
