48656C6C6F2C20776F726C64210A

   5:   48                      rex64
   6:   65                      gs
   7:   6c                      ins    BYTE PTR es:[rdi],[dx]
   8:   6c                      ins    BYTE PTR es:[rdi],[dx]
   9:   6f                      outs   [dx],DWORD PTR ds:[rsi]
   a:   2c 20                   sub    al,0x20
   c:   77 6f                   ja     7d <clever_trick+0x6a>
   e:   72 6c                   jb     7c <clever_trick+0x69>
  10:   64 21 0a                and    DWORD PTR fs:[rdx],ecx

This has the lovely property of being gibberish to both those who do, and those who do not know Intel assembly.

The clever trick here is to place a string somewhere that can be executed by a CPU but just before that string place a call to somewhere else, and in that call the return address (the next instruction after the call, or here also the string) is popped and used as the address to print via write.

The assembly might be less confusing than a context-free disassembly.

    ; OpenBSD, AMD64, NASM
    
    BITS 64
    
    %define sys_exit  1
    %define sys_write 4
    
    section .note.openbsd.ident
        align 2
        dd 8, 4, 1
        db 'OpenBSD',0
        dd 0
        align 2
    
    section .text
    
    global  _start
    
    _start:
        call clever_trick
        db "Hello, world!", 0x0a
    
    clever_trick:
        pop rsi
        mov rax,sys_write
        mov rdi,1                   ; stdout
        mov rdx,14                  ; length
        syscall
    
        mov rax,sys_exit
        xor rdi,rdi
        syscall

You may want to know how to actually build this file into something. Porting it to some other operating system or architecture will take more work.

    $ make clever-helloworld
    nasm -f elf64 clever-helloworld.asm -o clever-helloworld.o
    ld.bfd -m elf_x86_64_obsd -nopie clever-helloworld.o -o clever-helloworld
    $ objdump -M intel -D clever-helloworld.o
    ...

On a somewhat related note, dc(1) can act as a hex decoder.

    $ echo 16 i 48656C6C6F2C20776F726C64210A P | dc
    Hello, world!

Or worse.

    $ echo 16 i F09F86970A P | dc
    🆗

tags #asm