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How to decompile and de-obfuscate a suspicious function with Recurse

Use the lift and decompile operations to turn a VM dispatcher or opaque predicate chain into readable pseudocode.

Authorization notice. Recurse is dual-use. Only use it on software, sites and systems you own or have explicit permission to test.

Reverse engineering. Decompiling malware to understand it is dual-use, so keep the work inside an isolated analysis environment and limit it to authorized samples.

Who it is forA malware reverser who hits a function that looks like a virtualized dispatcher or a chain of opaque predicates and cannot read the raw disassembly.

The problemPlain disassembly of obfuscated code is hard to follow, and manual reading takes a long time.

The outcomeC-like pseudocode for the function, plus a de-obfuscated intermediate form that you can compare against the original listing.

What you need first

  • Node.js 20 or newer and npm 10 or newer
  • Rust 1.77 or newer with cargo, installed through rustup
  • Linux system packages for Tauri (libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev and the others listed in the README) if you build the desktop app on Debian or Ubuntu
  • A binary you are allowed to analyze
  • An OpenAI-compatible API key (for example OPENROUTER_API_KEY) if you want the chat agent to run

Steps

  1. Start the desktop app with just dev and open the target binary.
  2. Select the suspicious function in the function list and open its disassembly tab.
  3. Ask the chat agent to run the lift op on that function to get the VTIL-style de-obfuscation IL.
  4. Ask the agent to run the decompile op to render C-like pseudocode for the same function.
  5. Rename variables and functions from the list or the function header, then keep the names so they persist in SQLite.

Prompt for your agent

In the Recurse app, open <target path> and select the function at <function address>. Run the lift and decompile operations on it, then summarize what the function does in three sentences. Verify the summary against the disassembly listing.

Caveat. The native decompiler is a lift, optimize and structure pipeline, so output may differ from the r2 or IDA Pro decompilers, which the README describes as more complete.

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