Wiki / Port and reverse
Clean-room and deep mode#
The mode decides how closely PortCode may examine the original.
| Clean-room (default) | Deep | |
|---|---|---|
| Observe from outside: run it, feed inputs, compare outputs | yes | yes |
| Read its documentation and public files | yes | yes |
| Disassemble, decompile, emulate, hexdump | no | yes |
| Inspect Unity, .NET and IL2CPP internals | no | yes |
| Chip in the app | ▣ clean-room | ◉ deep |
Switching#
portcode --deep # start in deep mode
portcode --clean-room # explicitly clean-room (the default)In the app: /deep and /clean. You can also set "mode": "deep" in portcode.json.
What is enforced#
The deep tools (disasm, emulate, decompile, functions, hexdump, unity, dotnet, unity_assets) refuse to run in clean-room mode and say how to switch. bash also refuses commands that look inside programs (disassemblers, decompilers, debuggers, and the like) in clean-room mode.
The deep tools#
| Tool | For |
|---|---|
disasm | disassembly with Capstone (x86, ARM, ARM64, MIPS, RISC-V, PPC…) |
emulate | run a function or decoder in isolation with Unicorn |
decompile | Pseudo-C from Ghidra, run headless (needs a JDK) |
functions | list the functions of a binary |
hexdump | bytes at an address |
unity | a Unity project, Mono or IL2CPP |
dotnet | types, methods, strings and decompilation of C# and .NET (ILSpy) |
unity_assets | scenes, TextAssets and MonoBehaviour data |
Engines install on request, after you approve, into an engines/ folder next to the binary, and every download has a published sha256 that is checked. See Engines.
The workbench#
/workbench (deep mode) shows functions, Pseudo-C, disassembly, hex and the evidence log side by side. j and k move, 1 2 3 switch the view, / filters, and a asks the agent about the selected function.
The strict two-session method#
portcode --deep -a reverse: study the original and writedocs/SPEC.mdin your own words.portcode --clean-room -a port: build the port from that spec only.
The second session never sees the original's internals, which is what "clean room" means.