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Decompiling Java
GODFREY NOLAN

APress Media, LLC

Decompiling Java
Copyright © 2004 by Godfrey Nolan
Originally published by Apress in 2004
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004
Lead Editor: Gary Cornell
Technical Reviewer: John Zukowski
Editorial Board: Steve Anglin, Dan Appleman, Ewan Buckingham, Gary Cornell, Tony Davis,
John Franldin, Jason Gilmore, Chris Mills, Steve Rycroft, Dominic Shakeshaft, Jim Sumser,
Karen Watterson, Gavin Wray, John Zukowski
Project Manager: Tracy Brown Collins
Copy Edit Manager: Nicole LeClerc
Copy Editor: Rebecca Rider
Production Manager: Kari Brooks
Production Editor: Katie Stence
Proofreader: Linda Seifert
Compositor and Artist: Kinetic Publishing Services, LLC
Indexer: Rebecca Plunkett
Cover Designer: Kurt Krames
Manufacturing Manager: Tom Debolski

Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicatlon Data

Nolan, Godfrey.
Decompiling Java I Godfrey Nolan.
p.cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4302-5469-0 ISBN 978-1-4302-0739-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-0739-9
1. Java (Computer program language) 1. TitIe.
QA76.73.J38N65 2004
005.13'3-dc22 2004014051

AU rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Trademarked names may appear in this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every
occurrence of a trademarked name, we use the names only in an editorial fashion and to the
benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark.

The information in this book is distributed on an "as is" basis, without warranty. Although every
precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author(s) nor Apress shall
have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any 10ss or damage caused or alleged to
be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this work.
In memory ofHanpeter Van Vliet
 Contents at a Glance
About the Author ................................................... ix
About the Technical Reviewer ..................................... xi
Acknowledgments ................................................... xiii

Chapter 1 Introduction ......................................... 1

Chapter 2 Ghost in the Machine ............................... 17
Chapter 3 Tools of the Trade ................................. 61
Chapter 4 Protecting Your Source: Strategies for
Defeating Decompilers .............................. 79
Chapter 5 Decompiler Design ................................. 121
Chapter 6 Decompiler Implementation ........................ 159
Chapter 7 Case Studies ....................................... 237
Appendix Classfile Grammar ................................. 247

Index ..................................................... ......... 255

v
 Contents
About the Author ................................................... ii
About the Technical Reviewer ..................................... xi
Acknowledgments ................................................... xiii

Chapter 1 Introduction ....................................... 1

Compilers and Decompilers ......................................... 2
Virtual Machine Decompilers ....................................... 3
Why Java? ..................................................... ...... 3
History: Basic Chronology ......................................... 6
Legal Issues ..................................................... ... 9
Moral Issues ..................................................... .. 12
Protecting Yourself ............................................... 13
Book Outiine ..................................................... .. 15
Conclusion ..................................................... .... 16

Chapter 2 Ghost in the Machine .......................... . 17

The JVM: An Exploitable Design? ................................. 18
Inside a Class file ................................................ 22
Conclusion ..................................................... .... 60

Chapter 3 Tools of the Trade .............................. 61

Employing Hexadecimal Editors ................................... 61
The Problem of Insecure Code .................................... 64
Disassemblers ..................................................... . 67
Decompilers ..................................................... ... 72
Obfuscators ..................................................... ... 75
Conclusion ..................................................... .... 76

vii
Contents

Chapter 4 Protecting Your Source: Strategies

for Defeating Decompilers .................... 79
Compilation Flags ................................................. 81
Writing Two Versions of the Applet or Application ............ 86
Employing Obfuscation ............................................. 88
Web Services and Server-Side Execution ....................... . 106
Encryption ........................................................ 108
Digital Rights Management ...................................... . 109
Fingerprinting Your Code ....................................... . 110
Selling the Source Code ......................................... 117
Native Methods ................................................... 117
Conclusion ........................................................ 119

Chapter 5 Decompiler Design .............................. 121

Introduction ...................................................... 122
Defining the Problem ............................................. 125
(De)Compiler Tools ............................................... 128
Strategy .......................................................... 141
Parser Design ..................................................... 149
Conclusion ........................................................ 157

Chapter 6 Decompiler Implementation .................... 159

ClassToXML Output: An Overview ................................. 159
Jlex Specification ............................................... 165
CUP Specification ................................................ 170
Test Suite ....................................................... . 182
Summarizing Decompiler Implementation ......................... 233
Conclusion ........................................................ 236

Chapter 7 Case Studies ..................................... 237

Case Studies ...................................................... 237
Conclusion ........................................................ 244

Appendix Class file Grammar .............................. 247

Index ............................................................ . 255

viii
 About the Author
Godfrey Nolan is President of RIIS LLC, where he specializes in web site
optimization. He has written numerous articles for different magazines and
newspapers in the US, the UK, and Ireland. Godfrey has had a healthy obsession
with reverse engineering bytecode ever since he wrote "Decompile Once, Run
Anywhere," which first appeared in Web Techniques in September 1997.

ix
 About the
Technical Reviewer
John Zukowski is a freelance writer and strategic Java consultant for JZ Ventures,
Inc. His latest endeavor is to create a next-generation mobile phone platform
with SavaJe Technologies. Look for the 1.5 edition of his Definitive Guide to
Swing for Java 2 in the fall of 2004 (also published by Apress}.

xi
 Acknowledgments
THERE ARE COUNTLESS PEOPLE I have to thank in some small way for helping me
with this book. Apologies if I've forgotten anyone.

• My wife, Nancy, and also my children, Rory and Dayna, for putting up with
all the times I've missed a family outing while writing this book. And we're
talking lots and lots of missed outings.

• Jonathon Kade, for all your hard work helping with the decompiler and
Chapter 6 in general.

• Gary Cornell, without whom this book would never have seen the light
of day.

• Tracy Brown Collins and Rebecca Rider at Apress, for putting up with my
countless missed deadlines. Do I need to say lots and lots again?

• John Zukowski, for all the helpful comments. And yes, I'm still ignoring the
one about having a comma in Hello World.

• Dave and Michelle Kowalske and all my other in-laws, for knowing when
not to ask, "Is that book finished yet?"

• Finally, to my parents, who have always taught me to aim high and who
have supported me when, more often than not, I fell flat on my face.

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction
WHEN COREL BOUGHT WordPerfect for almost $200 million from the Novell
Corporation in the mid 1990s, nobody would have thought that in a matter of
months they would have been giving away the source code free. However, when
Corel ported WordPerfect to Java and released it as a beta product, a simple
program called Mocha1 could quickly and easily reverse engineer, or decompile,
significant portions of Corel's Office for Java back into source code.
Decompilation is the process that transforms machine-readable code into
a human readable format. When an executable, a Java class file, or a DLL is
decompiled, you don't quite get the original format; instead you get a type of
pseudo source code, often incomplete and almost always without the comments.
But often what you get is more than enough to understand the original code.
The purpose of this book is to address an unmet need in the programming
community. For some reason, the ability to decompile Java has been largely
ignored even though it is relatively easy for anyone with the appropriate mindset
to do. In this book, I would like to redress the balance by looking at what tools
and tricks of the trade are currently being employed by people who are trying to
recover source code and those who are trying to protect it using, for example,
obfuscation.
This book is for those who want to learn Java by decompilation, those who sim-
ply want to learn how to decompile Java into source code, those who want to protect
their code, and finally those who want to better understand Java bytecodes and the
Java VIrtual Machine (JVM) by building a Java decompiler.
This book takes your understanding of decompilers and obfuscators to the
next level by

• Exploring Java bytecodes and opcodes in an approachable but detailed

manner.

• Using examples that show you what to do when an applet only partially
decompiles.

• Providing you with simple strategies you can use to show users how to
protect their code.

• Showing you what it takes to build your own decompiler.

1. Mocha was one of the early Java decompilers. You'll see more on Mocha later in this chapter.

1
Chapter 1

Compilers and Decompilers

Computer languages were developed because most normal people cannot work
in machine code or its nearest equivalent, Assembler. Thankfully, we realized
pretty early in computing technology that humans just weren't cut out to program
in machine code. Computer languages, such as Fortran, COBOL, C, Visual Basic,
and more recently, Java and C#, were developed to allow us to put our ideas in
a human-friendly format that can then be converted into a format that a computer
chip can understand.
At its most basic, the compiler's job is to translate this textual representation-
source code-into a series of O's and 1's-machine code-which the computer can
interpret as actions or steps that you want it to perform. It does this using a series
of pattern matching rules. A lexical analyzer tokenizes the source code2 and any
mistakes or words that are not in the compiler's lexicon are rejected immediately.
These tokens are then passed to the language parser, which matches one or more
tokens to a series of rules and translates these tokens into intermediate code
(some early versions ofVisual Basic, Pascal, and Java) or sometimes straight into
machine code (C and Fortran). Any source code that doesn't match a compiler's
rules is rejected and the compilation fails.
So now you know what a compiler does. Well, to be honest, you've only
scratched the surface; compiler technology has always been a specialized, and
sometimes complicated, area of computing. Modem advances mean things are
going to get even more complicated, especially in the virtual machine domain.
In part, this drive comes from Java and now .NET. Just in Time (JIT) compilers
have tried to close the gap between Java and C++ execution times by optimizing
the execution of Java bytecodes. This seems like an impossible task because
Java bytecode is, after all, interpreted, whereas C++ is compiled. But JIT com-
piler technology is making significant advances and is also making Java compilers
and virtual machines much more complicated beasts by incorporating these
advances.
From your point of view, you need to know that most compilers do a lot of
preprocessing and post-processing. The preprocessor readies the source code for
the lexical analysis by stripping out all unnecessary information, such as the
programmer's comments, and adding in any standard or included header files or
packages. A typical post-processor stage is coJe optimization, where the compiler
parses or scans the code, reorders it, and removes any redundancies, which will
hopefully increase the efficiency and speed of your code.
Decompilers, no big surprise here, translate the machine code or intermediate
code back into source code. In other words, the whole process is reversed. Machine
code is tokenized in some way and parsed or translated back into source code. This
transformation rarely results in original source code because some information is
lost in the pre- and post-processing stages.

2. Lexical comes from the word lexicon or dictionary.

2
 Introduction

Take the analogy of idioms in human languages, which are often the most diffi-
cult part of a sentence or phrase to translate. My favorite idiom is Z:esprit d'escalier,
which literally translates as the wit ofthe staircase. But what it really means is that
perfect witty comment or comeback that pops into your head half an hour too late.
Similarly (and I know I'm stretching it a bit here) source code can often be translated
into machine code in more than one way. Java source code is designed for humans
and not computers, and often some steps may be redundant or can be performed
more quickly in a slightly different order. Because of these lost elements, few (if any)
decompilations result in the original source.

Virtual Machine Decompilers

Several notable attempts have been made to decompile machine code; Christina
Cifuentes' dec is one of the most recent. 3 However, at the machine code level, the
data and instructions are commingled, and it is a much more difficult, but not
impossible, to recover the original code.
In a virtual machine, the code has simply passed through a preprocessor and
the decompiler's job becomes one of simply reversing the preprocessing stages of
compilation. This makes interpreted code much, much easier to decompile. Sure,
there are no comments, and worse still, no specification, but then again, there are
also no research and development (R&D) costs.

Why Java?
The original ]VM was designed to run on a TV cable set-top box. As such, it was
a very small stack machine that pushed and popped its instructions on and off
a stack using only a limited instruction set. This made the instructions very easy
to understand with relatively little practice. Because the compilation process
was a two-stage process, the ]VM als,o required the compiler to pass on a lot of
information, such as variable and method names, that would not otherwise be
available. These names could be almost as helpful as comments when you were
trying to understand decompiled source code.
The current design of the JVM is independent of the Java 2 Software Development
Kit (SDK). In other words, the language and libraries may change, but the ]VM
and the opcodes are fixed. This means that if Java is prone to decompilation now,
then it is always likely to be prone to decompilation. In many cases, as you shall
see, decompiling a Java class is as easy as running a simple DOS or Unix command.

3. dec comes from cc, which used to be the standard command-line command for compiling
C programs, and still is, if like me you're IDE impaired.

3
Chapterl

In the future, the JVM may very well be changed to stop decompilation,
but this would break any backward compatibility and all current Java code
would have to be recompiled. And although this has happened before in the
Microsoft world with different versions ofVisual Basic, a lot more companies
than Sun develop virtual machines.
JVMs are now available for almost every operating system and web browser. In
fact, Java applets and applications can run on any computer or chip from a main-
frame right down to a handheld or a smartcard as long as a JVM and appropriate
class libraries exists for that platform. So it's no longer as simple as changing one
JVM,
What makes this situation even more interesting is that companies that want
to Java enable their operating system or browser usually create their own JVMs.
Sun is now only really responsible for the JVM specification. It seems that things
have now progressed so far that any fundamental changes to the JVM specification
would have to be backward compatible. Modifying the JVM to prevent decompila-
tion would require significant surgery, and in all probability, it would break this
backward compatibility, thus ensuring that Java classes will decompile for the fore-
seeable future.
It's true that no such compatibility restrictions exist on the Java SDK, where
more and more functionality is added almost daily. And the first crop of decom-
pilers did dramatically fail when inner classes were first introduced in the Java
Development Kit (JDK) 1.1. However, this isn't really a surprise because Mocha
was already a year out of date when 1.1 was released and other decompilers were
quickly modified to recognize inner classes.

Top Ten Reasons Why Java Is More

Vulnerable to Decompilation

1. For portability, Java code is partially compiled and then interpreted

bytheJVM.
2. Java's compiled classes contain a lot of symbolic information for the JVM,
3. Because of backward compatibility issues, the JVM's design is not likely
to change.
4. The JVM has very few instructions or opcodes.
5. The JVM is a simple stack machine.
6. Standard applets and applications have no real protection against
decompilation.
7. Java applets are typically small and therefore intelligible without com-
ments.

4
 Introduction

8. Larger Java applications are automatically compiled into smaller modu-

lar classes.
9. Java applets are typically downloaded for free.
10. Java hype and cutthroat competition equal plenty of applications and
plenty of people willing to decompile them.

So unlike other Java books, I don't expect that this book will go out of date
with the next release of the JDK. Sure, some extra features may be added, but the
underlying architecture will remain the same. Let's begin with a simple example
in Listing 1-1.

Listing 1-1. Simple Java Source Code Example

public class Casting {

public static void main(String args[]){
for(char c=O; c < 128; C++) {
System.out.println("ascii " + (int)c + " character "+ c);
}
}
}

Listing 1-2 shows the output for a simple class file whose source is shown in
Listing 1-1 using javap, Sun's class file disassembler that came with the original
versions of Sun's JDK. You can decompile Java so easily because, as you'll see
later in the book, the NM is a simple stack machine with no registers and a lim-
ited number of high-level instructions or opcodes.

Listing 1-2. ]avap Output

Compiled from Casting.java

public synchronized class Casting extends java.lang.Object
I* ACC_SUPER bit set *I
{
public static void main(java.lang.String[]);
I* Stack=4, Locals=2, Args_size=l *I
public Casting();
I* Stack=l, Locals=l, Args_size=l *I
}

5
Chapter 1

Method void main(java.lang.String[])

o iconst_o
1 istore_1
2 goto 41
5 getstatic #12 <Field java.io.PrintStream out>
8 new #6 <Class java.lang.StringBuffer>
11 dup
12 ldc #2 <String "ascii ">
14 invokespecial #9 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer(java.lang.String)>
17 iload_1
18 invokevirtual #10 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer append(char)>
21 ldc #1 <String " character ">
23 invokevirtual #11 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer append(java.lang.String)>
26 iload_1
27 invokevirtual #10 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer append(char)>
30 invokevirtual #14 <Method java.lang.String toString()>
33 invokevirtual #13 <Method void println(java.lang.String)>
36 iload_1
37 iconst_1
38 iadd
39 i2c
40 istore_1
41 iload_1
42 sipush 128
4S if_icmplt 5
48 return

Method Casting()
o aload_o
1 invokespecial #8 <Method java.lang.Object()>
4 return<

It should be obvious that a lot of the source code information exists in

a class file; my aim is to show you how to take this information and reverse engi-
neer it into source code. However, in many cases, Java classes won't decompile
without some extra effort; you'll need to understand the underlying design and
architecture of a Java classfile and the JVM itself, which is what I'm going to pro-
vide you with in the remainder of this book.

History: Basic Chronology

Since before the dawn of the humble PC .... Scratch that. Since before the dawn
of COBOL, decompilers have been around in one form or another. In fact, you

6
 Introduction

have to go all the way back to ALGOL to find the earliest example of a decom-
piler. Donnelly and Englanderwrote.D-Neliac at the Naval Electronic Labs (NEL)
in 1960. Its primary function was to convert non-Neliac compiled programs into
Neliac compatible binaries. Neliac was an ALGOL-type language that stood for
the Navy Electronics Laboratory International ALGOL Compiler.
Over the years, there have been other decompilers for COBOL, Ada, Fortran,
and many other esoteric as well as mainstream languages running on IBM main-
frames, PDP/Us, and Univacs, among others. Probably the main reason for these
early developments was to translate software or convert binaries to run on dif-
ferent hardware.
More recently, reverse engineering and the Y2K problem have become the
acceptable face of decompilation. Converting legacy code to get around the Y2K
problem often required disassembly or full decompilation. Reverse engineering
is a huge growth area that has not disappeared since the tum of the millennium.
Problems caused by the Dow Jones hitting the 10-thousand mark-ah, such fond
memories-and the introduction of the Euro have all caused financial programs
to fall over.
Even without these developments reverse engineering techniques are being
used to analyze old code, which typically has thousands of incremental changes,
in order to remove any redundancies and convert these legacy systems into much
more efficient animals.
At a much more basic level, hexadecimal dumps of PC machine code have
always given programmers extra insight into how something is achieved or into
how to break any artificial restrictions placed on the software. Magazine CDs
were either time-bombed or had restricted copies of games; these could be patched
to change demonstration copies into full versions of the software using primitive
disassemblers such as the DOS debug command.
Anyone well versed in Assembler can learn to quickly spot patterns in code
and bypass the appropriate source code fragments. Pirate software is a huge
problem for the software industry; disassembling the code is just one technique
employed by the professional or amateur bootlegger. Hence the downfall of many
an arcane copy protection technique.
However, the DOS debug command and Hexidecimal editors are primitive tools
and it would probably be quicker to write the code from scratch than to try to re-
create the source code from Assembler. For many years now, traditional software
companies have also been involved in reverse engineering software. They have
studied new techniques, and their competition has copied these techniques all
over the world using reverse engineering and decompilation tools. Generally, this
is accomplished using in-house decompilers, which are not for public consump-
tion and are definitely not going to be sold over the counter.
It's likely that the first real Java decompiler was actually written in IBM and
not by Hanpeter Van Vliet, author of Mocha. Daniel Ford's whitepaper Jive: A Java
Decompiler, dated May 1996, appears in IBM Research's search engines. This
whitepaper just beat Mocha, which wasn't announced until July 1996.

7
Chapter 1

Academic decompilers such as the University of Queensland's dec are avail-

able in the public domain. Fortunately for the likes of Microsoft, decompiling
Office using dec would create so much code that it would be about as user
friendly as Debug or a hexadecimal dump. Most modem commercial software's
source code is so large that it becomes unintelligible without the design docu-
ments and lots of source code comments. Let's face it; many people's C++ code
is hard enough to read six months after they wrote it. So how easy would it be
for someone else to decipher C code that came from compiled C++ code with-
out any help, even if the library calls aren't traversed?
What does come as a big surprise is the number of decompilers that are cur-
rently available but aren't that well publicized. Decompilers or disassemblers are
available for Clipper (Valkyrie), FoxPro (ReFox), Pascal, C (dec and decomp), Ada,
and, of course, Java. Even the Newton, loved by Doonesbury aficionados every-
where, isn't safe.
Not surprisingly, decompilers are much more common for interpreted lan-
guages, such as Visual Basic, Pascal, or Java, because of the larger amounts of
information being passed around. Some even have built-in dynamic compilers
that regenerate source code on the fly, which is then subsequently recompiled
into machine code, depending on the initial decompilation.

Visual Basic Decompilers

Let's take a look at Visual Basic (VB), another interpreted language, as an example
of what can happen to interpreted languages. Early versions ofVB were interpreted
by the vbrun. dll in a somewhat similar fashion to Java and the JVM; and just like
a Java classfile, the source code for VB programs is also bundled within the binary.
Bizarrely, Visual Basic 3 retains even more information than Java; this time even
the programmer's comments are included.
The original versions ofVB generated an intermediate pseudocode, called
p-code, which was also in Pascal and originates in the P-System. 4 And before you
say anything, yes, Pascal and all its derivatives are just as vulnerable; this state-
ment also includes early versions of Microsoft's C compiler, just so that nobody
else feels left out. The p-codes are not dissimilar to bytecodes and are essentially
VB opcodes that are interpreted by vbrun. dll at run time. Ever wonder why you
need to include vbrun. dll with VB executables? Well now you know-you need to
include vbrun. dll so that it can interpret the p-code and execute your program.
Doctor (Hans-Peter) Diettrich from Germany is the author of the epony-
mously titled DoDi-perhaps the most famous Visual Basic decompiler. These
days DoDi-also known as Vbis3-is outdated because it only decompiles VB3
binaries, although there were rumors of a version for VB4. But because VB

4. http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/

8
 Introduction

moved to compiled rather than interpreted code, the number of decompilers

completely fell away.
At one time, Visual Basic also had its own culture of decompilers and obfus-
cators, or protection tools as they're called in VB. Doctor Diettrich provides
VBGuard for free on his site, and other programs, such as Decompiler Defeater,
Protect, Overwrite, Shield, and VBShield, are available from other sources. But
they too have all but disappeared with VB5 and VB6.
This was, of course, before .NET. With the arrival of .NET, we've once again
come full circle and VB is once again interpreted. Not surprisingly, we're already
seeing decompilers and obfuscators such as the Exemplar andAnakrino decom-
pilers as well as Demeanor and Dotfuscator.

Hanpeter Van Vliet

Oddly enough for a technical subject, this book also has a very human element.
HanpeterVan Vliet wrote the first public domain decompiler, Mocha, while recov-
ering from a cancer operation in the Netherlands. He also wrote an obfuscator
called Crema that attempted to protect an applet's source code. If Mocha was the
Uzi machine gun, then Crema was the bulletproof jacket. In a now classic Internet
marketing strategy, Mocha was free, whereas there was a small charge for Crema.
The beta version of Mocha caused a huge controversy when it was first made
available on Hanpeter's web site, especially after it was featured in a clnet article.
Because of the controversy, Hanpeter took the very honorable step of removing
Mocha from his web site. He then held a vote about whether or not Mocha should
once again be made available. The vote was ten to one in favor of Mocha, and
soon after it reappeared on Hanpeter's web site.
However, Mocha never made it out of beta, and while I was conducting some
research for a Web Techniques article on this very subject, I learned from his wife
that Hanpeter's throat cancer finally got him. He died at the age of 34 on New
Year's Eve, 1996.
The source code for both Crema and Mocha were sold to Borland shortly
before Hanpeter's death, with all proceeds going to Hanpeter's wife, Ingrid. Some
early versions of ]Builder shipped with an obfuscator, which was probably Crema
This attempted to protect Java code from decompilation by replacing ASCII variable
names with control characters.
I'll talk more about the host of other Java decompilers and obfuscators later
in the book.

Legal Issues
Before you start building your own decompiler, why don't you take this opportunity
to consider the legal implications of decompiling someone else's code for your own
enjoyment or benefit? Just because Java has taken decompiling technology out of

9
Chapter 1

some very serious propeller head territory and into more mainstream computing
doesn't make it any less likely that you or your company will get sued. It may make
it more fun, but you really should be careful.
To start with, why don't you try following this small set of ground rules:

• Do not decompile an applet, recompile it, and then pass it off as your own.

• Don't even think of trying to sell a recompiled applet to any third parties.

• Try not to decompile an applet or application that comes with a license

agreement that expressly forbids decompiling or reverse engineering
the code.

• Don't decompile an applet to remove any protection mechanisms and

then recompile it for your own personal use.

Over the past few years, big business has tilted the law firmly in its favor
when it comes to decompiling software. Companies can use a number of legal
mechanisms to stop you from decompiling their software; these would leave you
with little or no legal defense if you ever had to appear in a court oflaw if some-
one discovered that you had decompiled their programs. Patent law, copyright
law, anti-reverse engineering clauses in shrink.wrap licenses, as well as a number
of laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) may all be used
against you. Different laws may apply in different countries or states; for exam-
ple, the "no reverse engineering clause" software license is a null and void clause
in the European Union (EU), but the basic concepts are the same-decompile
a program for the purpose of cloning the code into another competitive product
and you're probably breaking the law.
The secret here is that you shouldn't be standing, kneeling, or pressing down
very hard on the legitimate rights-that is, the copyright rights-of the original
author. That's not to say that conditions exist in which it is OK to decompile.
However, certain limited conditions do exist where the law actually favors decom-
pilation or reverse engineering through a concept known as fair use. From almost
the dawning of time, and certainly from the beginning of the industrial age, many
of humankind's greatest inventions have come from an individual who has created
something special while standing on the shoulders of giants. For example, both the
invention of the steam train and the common light bulb were relatively modest
incremental steps in technology. The underlying concepts were provided by other
people, and it was up to Stephenson or Edison to create the final object. You can
see an excellent example of the Stephenson's debt to many other inventors such as
James Watt in the following timeline of the invention of the Stephenson's Rocket at
http: I !Wt~N. usgennet. org/usa/topic/steam/timeline. html. This concept ofstanding
on the shoulders of giants is one of the reasons why patents first appeared-to
allow people to build on other creations while still giving the original inventor
some compensation for their initial idea for period of, say, 20 years.
10
 Introduction

In the software arena, trade secrets are typically protected by copyright law
rather than through any patents. Sure, patents can protect certain elements of
a program, but it is highly unlikely that a complete program will be protected by
a patent or a series of patents. Software companies want to protect their invest-
ment, so they typically turn to copyright law or software licenses to prevent
people from essentially stealing their research and development efforts.
Copyright law is not rock solid; if it was, there would be no inducement to
patent an idea and the patent office would quickly go out of business. Copyright
protection does not extend to interfaces of computer programs, and a developer
can use the fair use defense if they can prove that they decompiled the program
to see how they could intemperate with any unpublished application program-
ming interfaces (APis) in the program.
If you are living in the EU, then more than likely you work under the EU
Directive on Legal Protection of Computer Programs. This states that you can
decompile programs under certain restrictive circumstances-for example,
when you are trying to understand the functional requirements you need to
create a compatible interface to your own program. Or, to put it another way,
if you need access to the internal calls of a third party program and the authors
refuse to divulge the APis at any price. Then, under the EU directive, you could
decompile the code to discover the APis. However, you'd have to make sure that
you were only going to use this information to create an interface to your own
program rather than create a competitive product. You also cannot reverse
engineer any areas that have been protected in any way.
For many years Microsoft's applications have allegedly gained unfair advan-
tage from underlying unpublished APis calls to Wmdows 3.1 and Wmdows 95
that are orders of magnitude quicker than the published APis. The Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) has come up with a useful road map analogy to help
explain this. Say you are trying to travel from Detroit to New York, but your map
doesn't show any interstate routes. Sure, you'd eventually get there traveling on
the back roads, but the trip would be a lot shorter if you had the Microsoft map,
complete with interstates. If these conditions were true, the EU directive would
be grounds for disassemblingWmdows 2000 or Microsoft Office (MSOffice), but
you better hire a good lawyer before you try it. Personally, I don't buy it as I can't
believe MSOffice could possibly be any slower than it currently is, so if there are
any hidden APis, they certainly don't seem to be causing any impact on the
speed of any of the MSOffice applications.
There are precedents that allow legal decompilation in the US too. The most
famous case to date is Sega v. Accolade. 5 In 1992, Accolade won a case against
Sega that ruled that their unauthorized disassembly of the Sega object code was
not copyright infringement. Accolade reverse engineered Sega's binaries into an
intermediate code that allowed them to extract a software key. This key allowed
Accolade's games to interact with Sega Genesis video consoles. Obviously Sega

5. http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/sega_v_accolade_977f2d1510_decision.html

11
Chapter 1

was not going to give Accolade access to APis, or in this case, code, to unlock the
Sega game platform. The court ruled in favor of Accolade judging that the
reverse engineering constituted fair-use. But before you think this gives you
carte blanche to decompile code, you might like to know that Atari v. Nintendo6
went against Atari under very similar circumstances.
In conclusion-see you can tell this is the legal section-the court cases in the
US and the EU directive stress that under certain circumstances reverse engineer-
ing can be used to understand the interoperability and create a program interface.
It cannot be used to create a copy to sell as a competitive product. Most Java
decompilation will not fall into this interoperability category. It is far more likely
that the decompiler wants to pirate the code, or at best, understand the underlying
ideas and techniques behind the software.
It is not very clear if reverse engineering to discover how an applet was written
would constitute fair use. The US Copyright Act of 1976's exclusion of "any idea,
procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery,
regardless of the form in which it is described" makes it sound like the beginning
of a defense for decompilation, and fear of the fair use clause is one of the reasons
why more and more software patents are being issued. Decompilation to pirate or
illegally sell the software cannot be defended.
However, from a developer's point of view, the situation looks bleak. The only
protection-in the form of a user's license-is about as useful as the laws against
copying music CDs or audiocassettes. It won't physically stop anyone from mak-
ing illegal copies and it doesn't act as any real deterrent for the home user. No
legal recourse will protect your code from a hacker, and it sometimes seems that
the people trying to create many of today's secure systems must feel like they are
standing on the shoulders of morons. You only have to look at the recent investi-
gation into eBook protection schemes7 and the whole DeCSS fiasco 8 to see how
paper-thin a lot of the recent so called secure systems really are.

Moral Issues
Decompiling Java is an excellent way to learning both the Java language and how
the NM works. It helps people climb up the Java learning curve because they
learn by seeing other people's programming techniques. The ability to decompile
applets or applications can make the difference between a basic understanding of
Java and an in-depth knowledge. Learning by example is one of the most power-
ful tools. It helps even more if you can pick your own examples and modify them
to your own needs.

6. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/cases/atarivnintendo.html
7. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/17/130226
8. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/resources.html

12
 Introduction

However, my book on decompiling would not be complete if I didn't discuss

the morality issues behind what amounts to stealing someone else's code. In the
early days of software, it was not uncommon to receive the source code with the
product. But in the last few decades, market economics have taken over and this
practice has almost disappeared with some notable open source exceptions such
as GNU and Linux. But now, due to a certain set of circumstances, we find that
Java comes complete with its source code.
The author, the publisher, the author's agent, and his agent's mother would
like to state that we are not advocating that readers of this book decompile pro-
grams for anything other than educational purposes. The purpose of this book is to
show readers how to decompile source code, but we are not encouraging anyone
to decompile other programmers' code and then try to use it, sell it, or repackage it
as if it was their own. Please be careful that you do not try to reverse engineer any
code that has a licensing agreement stating that you should not decompile it. It is
not fair, and you'll only get yourself in trouble. Having said that, there are thou-
sands of applets on the Web, which when decompiled, will help you understand
good and bad Java programming techniques.
To a certain extent, I'm pleading the "Don't shoot the messenger" defense.
I'm not the first to spot this flaw in Java, and I certainly won't be the last person
to write about the subject. My reasons for writing this book are, like the early
days of the Internet, fundamentally altruistic. Or, in other words, I found this
cool trick and I want to tell everyone about it.
Having said this, let me remind you that you can never be sure that the decom-
piler generated code that was 100 percent accurate. So you're in for a nasty surprise
if you intend to use Java decompilation as the basis for your own products.

Protecting Yourself
Pirated software is a big headache for many software companies and big business
for others. At the very least, software pirates could use decompilers to remove any
licensing restrictions, but imagine the consequences if the technology was available
to decompile Office 2000, recompile it, and sell it as a new competitive product. To
a certain extent, that could easily have happened when Corel released the beta ver-
sion of Corel's Office for Java.
Perhaps this realization is starting to dawn on Java software houses. We are
beginning to see two price scales on Java components: one for the classes and
one for the source code. This is entirely speculative, but it seems that companies
such as Sitraka (now Quest) realized that a certain percentage of their users
would decompile their classes, and as a result, a few years ago Sitraka chose to
sell the source code for JClass as well as other components. This makes any
decompilation redundant as the code is provided along with the classes and it
also makes some money for the developer by charging a little extra for the
source code.

13
Chapter 1

But is all doom and gloom? Should you just resign yourselves to the fact that
Java code can be decompiled or is there anything you can do to protect your code?
Here are some options:

• License agreements

• Protection schemes within your code

• Code fingerprinting

• Obfuscation

• Intellectual Property Rights UPR) protection schemes

• Executable applications

• Server-side code

• Encryption

Although you'll look at all these in more detail later, you should know that
the first four only act as deterrents and the last four are effective, but have other
implications. Let me explain.
license agreements don't offer any real protection from a programmer who
wants to decompile your code.
Spreading protection schemes throughout your code, such as by using combi-
nations of getCodeBase and getDocumentBase or server authentication, is useless
because they can be simply commented out of the decompiled code.
Code fingerprinting is what happens when spurious code is used to watermark
or fingerprint source code, and it can be used in conjunction with license agree-
ments, but it is only really useful in a court of law. Better decompilation tools will
profile the code and remove any extra dummy code.
Obfuscation replaces the method names and variable names in a class file
with weird and wonderful names. This is an excellent deterrent, but the source
code is still visible and in conjunction with obfuscated code when the better
decompilers are used, so often this is not much better than compiling without
the debug flag. HoseMocha, another obfuscator, works by adding a spurious
pop bytecode after every return; it does nothing to the code but it does kill the
decompiler. However, developers can quickly modify their decompiler once
this becomes apparent, assuming they're still around to make the changes.
IPR protection schemes such as IBM's Cryptolope Live!, InterTrust's DigiBox,
and Breaker Technologies' SoftSEAL are normally used to sell HTML documents
or audio files on some pay-per-view basis or pay-per-group scheme. However,
because they typically have built in trusted HTML viewers, they allow Java applets
to be seen but not copied. Unfortunately IPR protection schemes are not cheap.
14
 Introduction

Worse still, some of the clients are written in 100 percent pure Java and can
therefore be decompiled.
The safest protection for Java applications is to compile them into executables.
This is an option on many Java compilers-SuperCede, for example. Your code will
now be as safe as any C or C++ executables-read a lot safer-but it will no longer
be portable because it no longer uses the NM.
The safest protection for applets is to hide all the interesting code on the
web server and only use the applet as a thin, front-end graphical user interface
(GUI). This has a downside; it may increase your web server load to unaccept-
able levels.
Several attempts have been made to encrypt a classfile's content and then
decrypt it in the classloader. Although at first glance this seems like an excellent
approach, sooner or later the classfile's bytecode has to be decrypted in order to
be executed by the NM, at which point it can be intercepted and decompiled.

Book Outline
Decompiling Java is not a normal Java language book. In fact, it is the complete
opposite of a standard Java textbook where the author teaches you how to trans-
late ideas and concepts into Java. You're interested in turning the partially compiled
Java bytecodes back into source code so that you can see what the original pro-
grammer was thinking. I won't be covering the language structure in depth, except
where it relates to bytecodes and the NM. All emphasis will be on Java's low-level
design rather than on the language syntax.
In the first part of this book, Chapters 2 through 4, I'll unravel the Java classfile
format and show you how your Java code is stored as bytecode and subsequently
executed by the NM. You'll also look at the theory and practice of decompilation
and obfuscation. I'll present some of the decompiler's tricks of the trade and explain
how to unravel the Java bytecode of even the most awkward class. You'll look at the
different ways people try to protect the source code and, when appropriate, learn to
expose any flaws or underlying problems with the different techniques so that you'll
be suitably informed before you purchase any source code protection tools.
The second part of this book, Chapters 5 and 6, I will primarily focus on how
to write your own Java decompiler. You'll build an extendable Java bytecode
decompiler. You'll do this for two reasons. First, although the NM design is fixed,
the language is not. Many of the early decompilers cannot handle Java con-
structs that appeared in the JDK 1.1, such as inner classes. Second, one of my
own personal pet peeves is reading a technical computer book that stops when
things are just getting interesting. The really difficult problems are then left to
the reader as an exercise. For some unknown reason, this seems to be particu-
larly true of Internet-related books. Partly as a reaction against that mentality,
I'm going to go into decompilers in some detail with plenty of practical examples
in hopefully as approachable a manner as possible.

15
Chapter 1

And while we're on the subject of pet peeves-sorry, I'll try to keep them to
a minimum-I won't be covering a potted history of the Internet or indeed Java.
This has been covered too many times before. If you want to know about the
ARPANET and Oak, then I'm afraid you're going to have to look elsewhere.9

Conclusion
Java decompilation is one of the best learning tools for new Java programmers.
What better way to find out how to write code than by taking an example off the
Internet and decompiling it into source code? It's also a necessary tool when
some dotcom web developers have gone belly up and the only way to fix their
code is to decompile it yourself. But it's also a menace if you're trying to protect
the investment of countless hours of design and development.
The aim of this book is to create some dialog about decompilation and
source code protection. I also want to separate the fact from fiction and show
you how easy it is to decompile code and what measures you can take to protect
it. Both Sun and Microsoft will tell you that decompilation isn't an issue and that
a developer can always be trained to read a competitor's Assembler, but separate
the data from the instructions and this task becomes orders of magnitude easier.
Don't believe it? Then read on and decide for yourself.

9. Such as Core Java 2, 6th edition, by CayS. Horstmann and Gary Cornell (Prentice Hall PTR,
2002).

16
 CHAPTER 2

Ghost 1n
•
the Machine
IF You'RE TRYING to understand just how good an obfuscator or decompiler really
is, then it helps to be able to see what's going on inside a classfile. Otherwise you're
relying on the word of a third-party vendor or, at best, a knowledgeable reviewer.
For most people, that's not good enough when you're trying to protect mission
critical code. At the very least, you should be able to talk intelligently about the
area and ask the obvious questions to understand just what's happening.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

-Wizard ofOz

At this moment, all sorts of noises are coming out of Microsoft in Redmond
saying that there really isn't anything to worry about when it comes to decompil-
ing .NET code. Sure, hasn't everyone been doing it for years at the Assembly level?
Similar noises were made when Java was in its infancy.
So, in this chapter, you'll be pulling apart a Java classfile to lay the founda-
tion for the following chapters on obfuscation theory and to help you during
the design of your decompiler. In order to get to that stage, you need to under-
stand bytecodes, opcodes, classfiles, and how they relate to the Java Virtual
Machine (JVM).
Several very good books are on the market about the JVM. The best is Bill
Verner's Inside the Java Virtual Machine (McGraw-Hill, 1998). Some of the
book's chapters are available online at http://www.artima.com/insidejvm/ed2/.
If you can't find this book, then check out Verner's equally excellent "Under
the Hood" articles inJavaWorld. This series of articles was the original mater-
ial on which the book was based. Sun's Java Virtual Machine Specification
(2nd Edition), written by Tim Lindholm and Frank Yellin, is both comprehen-
sive and very informative for would-be decompiler writers. But because it is
a specification, it is not what you would call a good read. This book is available
online at http: I /java. sun. com/docs/books/vmspec or you can purchase it
(Addison-Wesley, 1999).
Oddly enough, I've yet to see a book that covers how to build a JVM; every
book published so far focuses on the abstract JVM rather than how someone
would implement one. With the rise of alternative JVMs from IBM and others,
I really expected to see at least one JVM book full of C code for converting byte-
code to executable native code, but it never came. Perhaps this is because it

17
Chapter2

would have a very limited audience and its sales would be in the hundreds rather
than the thousands.
However, my focus is very different from other JVM books. You could say I'm
approaching things from the completely opposite direction. Your task is to get
from bytecode to source, whereas everyone else wants to know how source is
translated into bytecode and ultimately executed. You should be much more
interested in how a classfile can be turned into source rather than how a classfile
is interpreted.
In this chapter, you'll be looking at how a classfile can be disassembled into
bytecodes and how these bytecodes can be turned into source. Of course, you
need to know how each bytecode functions, but you should be less interested in
what happens to them when they are within the ]VM, and my emphasis will dif-
fer accordingly.

The JVM: An Exploitable Design?

Java classfiles are designed to be quickly transmitted across a network or via the
Internet. As a result, they are compact and are relatively simple to understand.
For portability, a classfile is only partially compiled into bytecodes by javac, Sun's
Java compiler. This is then interpreted and executed by a JVM, usually on a com-
pletely different machine or operating system.
The JVM's classfile interface is strictly defined by Sun's Java Virtual Machine
Specification. But how a JVM ultimately turns bytecodes into machine code is
left up to the developer. However, that really shouldn't concern you, because
once again, your interest should stop at the JVM. It may help if you think of
classfiles as being analogous to object files in other languages, such as C or C++,
waiting to be linked and executed by the JVM only with a lot more symbolic
information.
There are many good reasons why a classfile carries around so much infor-
mation. For many, the Internet is seen as a bit of a modern day Wild West where
crooks and criminals are plotting to infect your hard disk with a virus or waiting
to grab any credit card details that might pass their way. As a result, the JVM was
designed from the bottom up to protect web browsers from any rogue applets.
Through a series of checks, the JVM and the class loader make sure that no mali-
cious code can be uploaded onto a web page.
However, all checks have to be performed lightning-quick to cut down on the
download time, so it's not really surprising that the original JVM designers opted
for a simple stack machine with lots of information available for those crucial
security checks. In fact, the design of the JVM is pretty secure even though some
of the early browser implementations made a couple or three serious blunders.
Unfortunately for developers, what keeps the code secure also makes it much
easier to decompile. The JVM's restricted execution environment and uncomplicated

18
 Ghost in the Machine

architecture, as well as the high-level nature of many ofits instructions, all conspire
against the programmer in favor of the decompiler.
At this point, it is probably also worth mentioning the fragile superclass prob-
lem. When a new method is added in C++, all classes that reference that class need
to be recompiled. Java gets around this by putting all the necessary symbolic infor-
mation into the classfile. The NM then takes care of all the linking and final name
resolution, loading all the required classes-including any externally referenced
fields and methods-on the fly. This delayed linking or dynamic loading, possibly
more than anything else, is why Java is so much more prone to decompilation.
By the way, I'm going to ignore native methods in these discussions. Native
methods, of course, are when some native C or C++ code is incorporated into the
application. This spoils Java application portability, and is one surefire way to
prevent a Java program from being decompiled.
So without further ado, let's take a brief look at the design of the NM.

Simple Stack Machine

The NM is in essence a simple stack machine with a program register to take
care of the program flow thrown in for good luck. The Java class loader takes the
class and presents it to the NM.
You can split the NM into four separate but distinct parts.

• Heap

• Program counter registers

• Method area

• Stack

Every application or applet has its own heap and method area and every thread
has its own register or program counter and program stack. Each program stack is
then further subdivided into stack frames, with each method having its own stack
frame. That's a lot of information for one paragraph, so in Figure 2-1, I illustrate this
in a simple diagram.

19
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
 CHAPTER IX
"Time keeps no measure when two friends are
parted."

MARIE woke on the Friday morning with the vague feeling that
something unpleasant was going to happen.
She lay for a moment looking round the room with sleepy eyes, then
suddenly she remembered—they were going back to London!
She sat up in bed, her dark hair falling about her shoulders, and
stared at her half-packed luggage.
This was the end of her honeymoon! Nearly a month since she had
been married—a month of bitterness and disappointments, with only
one bright memory attaching to it—her friendship with Feathers.
And now she was leaving even that behind! She was conscious of a
little shrinking fear as she thought of it.
Who would help her through the long days when he was not at
hand? She fell back helplessly on her old futile hope.
"I shall be used to it soon! I must get used to living like this soon,
surely!"
There would be Aunt Madge, too; It was comforting to think of her,
but Marie did not realize that when she married Chris she had burnt
her boats behind her, and would never again find happiness or
contentment in the simple things that had pleased her before.
Her heart was heavy as she went downstairs; it was a particularly
beautiful morning, and her eyes were misty with tears as she looked
at the blue sea and the sunlight and realized that to-morrow she
would open her eyes on bricks and mortar and smoky London.
Yet it had been her own wish to return. She could have stayed on
had she chosen.
"Good morning," said Feathers beside her. 97

She turned quickly, her eyes brightening.

"Am I down before you? It's generally the other way about?"
"Yes, I overslept myself. Where's Chris?"
"I don't think he's up yet."
There was a little silence.
"Are you going by the morning train?" Feathers asked presently.
"No, after lunch, I think; we shall be home about five."
She looked up at him wistfully. "Have you got a headache?" she
asked in concern. "You look as if you have."
He laughed.
"No. I don't indulge in such luxuries, but I didn't sleep particularly
well last night."
"A guilty conscience?" Marie said, teasingly.
"Probably." He stepped out into the sunny garden. "Shall we go for a
stroll, as it's your last morning?"
She followed at once.
"That sounded so horrid," she said, with a half sigh. "My last
morning! It sounds as if I were going to be executed or something."
"The last of happy days here, I should have said," Feathers
corrected himself gravely. "I hope it will also be the first of many and
much happier days to come."
"Thank you." Suddenly she laughed. "Why, it's Friday! I always seem
to choose unlucky days to go to places or do important things. I was
married on Friday, and I came home from Paris after father died on
Friday."
"Well, it's as good a day as any other."
She shook her head.
"Not for me," she said, unthinkingly, then laughed to cover the
admission of her words.
"I'm superstitious, you see."
"Absurd!"
"I know it is, and I never used to be."
"I don't believe you are now." he declared. 98

"What are you looking at?" Marie had stood suddenly still, and was
looking down on the sands.
The tide was out, and a man and woman were walking along
together close to the water's edge.
"It's Chris and Mrs. Heriot," Feathers said quietly. "Shall we go and
meet them?"
He turned towards the steps leading down to the shore, but Marie
did not move. She was very pale, and the look in her eyes cut him to
the heart when he looked at her.
"I don't think I will—I'd rather go back—they haven't seen us," she
answered.
She would have turned back the way they had come, but Feathers
resolutely barred the way.
"Mrs. Lawless, don't you think it would be much wiser to come along
and meet them?" he asked deliberately.
She raised her troubled eyes to his.
"I don't want to . . . why need I? Oh, do you think I must?"
He tried to laugh, as if it were a subject of no importance.
"Why not? They have probably seen us."
He could see refusal in her face; then all at once she gave in.
"Very well." But her steps dragged as she followed him down to the
sands, and her face had not regained its color.
Feathers was racking his brains for means whereby to disperse the
suspicion which he knew was in her mind. He was cursing Chris with
all his heart, even while he was level-headed enough to guess that
in all probability his friend's meeting with Mrs. Heriot was entirely
one of chance. When they were near enough he called out to them
cheerily:
"Now, then, you two, it's breakfast time, so hurry! Mrs. Lawless and
I have been right along to the headland."
It was not the truth, but Marie hardly noticed what he said; she was
99

trying desperately to recover her composure and face Mrs. Heriot

with a smile.
They walked back to the hotel, the two men behind.
"I am so sorry we are leaving, now it has really come to the point,"
Marie said. She kept her hands clenched in the pockets of the little
woolly coat she wore; she wondered if the elder woman could hear
the hardness of her voice.
"I'm ever so sorry, too," Mrs. Heriot said gushingly. "It's the worst of
an hotel, isn't it? As soon as one gets to like people they leave."
"One can always meet them again," Marie said deliberately. She was
wondering desperately if Chris had already made some such
arrangement with this woman.
Mrs. Heriot smiled enigmatically.
"It so seldom happens, though," she said. "Life is so like that book,
'Ships that pass in the night,' don't you think?"
"I haven't read it," Marie said bluntly.
She hated Mrs. Heriot, hated everything about her—her voice, her
smile, even her clothes—she hated them all; she went straight in to
breakfast without waiting for Chris, and when he joined her she was
quite well aware that his eyes were turned to her again and again
anxiously.
Directly breakfast was over she turned to go upstairs, but he
Followed.
"Where are you going, Marie Celeste?" He tried hard to speak
naturally, but he had never felt more uncomfortable in his life; he
knew what Marie must be thinking, and he realized that the only
explanation he could offer of his early walk with Mrs. Heriot was a
very thin one indeed.
She answered without stopping or looking round.
"I am going to finish packing."
"I'll come with you."
She did not answer, and he followed her up to her room.
"Why don't you go and have a swim?" she asked then. "It's a pity to
waste the last morning indoors."
"I will go if you will come with me," he said at once. 100

She shook her head.

"No, thank you; I haven't got the nerve."
"You'll be perfectly safe with me; I'll look after you."
She shook her head again.
"No, thank you."
She began walking about the room, folding up the few things she
had not already packed and ramming them anyhow into the open
trunk.
Chris watched her for a moment with morose eyes; then all at once
he blurted out:
"Hang it all! I know what you're thinking, so why don't you say it?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"You do know. Marie, stop walking about and come here."
"I can't; there's a lot to do, and I'm busy."
Chris strode across to her, tore the little frock she was folding from
her hands and threw it down on the bed.
"I hate being treated like this!" he said passionately. "I won't have it!
If you think I arranged to meet that infernal woman, why the devil
can't you say so and have done with it?"
"I don't care if you arranged to meet her or not."
He laughed. "You do! I could see in your face at once that you were
angry about it. Come, Marie Celeste, own up!"
He laid his hand on her arm carelessly, but she flung him off; his
touch seemed to rouse all her pent-up passion and bitterness; her
eyes blazed as she turned and faced him.
"How many more times am I to tell you that I don't care what you
do or who you spend your time with? You can go out with Mrs.
Heriot all day and every day for all I care. I should stay down here
longer, if I were you; there's no need for you to come home."
She was trembling in every limb; she leaned against the end of the
bed to steady herself.
Chris had flushed up to his eyes; he had a hot temper once it was
101

aroused, as Marie knew, and something in the way in which she

looked at him had roused it now.
He answered as angrily as she that he should choose his own
friends, and spend his time as he liked; if she thought he was going
to be tied to her apron strings for the rest of his life she was
mistaken; he had been used to having his own way, and he was
going to continue to have it. Having relieved himself of a few more
violent remarks, he calmed down a little, strode over to the window
and flung it wide.
"Dash it all," he went on presently, more quietly. "It's no worse than
you walking about the whole time with Feathers. I might just as well
cut up rough and forbid you to speak to him, but I'm not such a
fool; I hope I can trust you." He liked the sound of that last phrase;
he thought it exceedingly tactful; he looked round at his wife with a
faint smile.
He thought he knew her so well—thought he had sounded every
depth and shallow of her nature. All their lives they had had these
little breezes, which had blown over almost at once and been
forgotten.
He was horrified, therefore, to see Marie standing with her face
buried in her hands, her whole slim body shaking with sobs.
Chris stood staring at her helplessly. Marie so seldom cried, it gave
him a bad shock to see her so upset—he must have said a great
deal more than he had intended. He flushed with angry shame.
"Marie—for heaven's sake!" He went to her and put his arms round
her, clumsily, but still with something comforting in their clasp.
"Don't cry, for God's sake!" he begged agitatedly. "What did I say?
Whatever it was, I didn't mean it—you know that!" He pressed her
head down against his shoulder, keeping his hand on her soft hair.
"Sorry, Marie Celeste!" he said humbly. "I was a brute; it shall never
happen again."
She pushed him gently from her, walking away to try and recover
herself.
"It's all right," she said presently with an effort, her voice broken102
by
little sobbing breaths. "It's all right. Please go away and leave me
alone."
She was bitterly ashamed to have broken down before him—he who
so hated tears and a scene.
She dried her eyes fiercely and tried to laugh.
"I don't often—cry, you know," she defended herself.
"I know you don't." Chris ran agitated fingers through his hair. "It
was my fault. I hope you'll forgive me." He followed her and put an
arm round her shoulders.
"Forgive me and forget it, Marie Celeste, will you?"
"It's all forgotten."
He laughed ruefully.
"You say that, but you don't mean it. And really it wasn't my fault
this morning. I went out early and met Mrs. Heriot on the sands—I
thought she never got up early. I swear to you that it was no fault of
mine. I don't care for the woman. I've told you so, haven't I?"
"Yes." She could not explain that it was not ordinary jealousy of Mrs.
Heriot that was breaking her heart, but jealousy of the fact that this
woman could prove an amusing companion to him, whereas she
herself was such a failure. The tears came again in spite of her
efforts, and she pressed her hands hard over her eyes in a vain
effort to restrain them. "Oh, if you would only go away!" she faltered
wildly.
Chris turned away with an impatient sigh; he felt at fault because of
his inability to comfort her; he went downstairs and hunted up
Feathers.
"Come on out for a walk," he said gruffly.
Feathers looked up from his paper, saw the frown on his friend's face
and rose.
"Right-oh! Where is Mrs. Lawless?"
"Packing."
"It seems a pity for her not to get all the air she can, as it's her last
morning."
"I asked her to come out, and she refused."
They went out together.
Chris walked along, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched
103

dejectedly. Feathers was perfectly well aware that something was

wrong, but asked no questions, and presently Chris broke out
wrathfully.
"What the devil a man wants to get mixed up with women for I'm
hanged if I know."
Feathers was looking out at the sea, and his face changed a little as
he asked carelessly:
"Well, who has been getting mixed up with them?"
"No one in particular that I know of! I simply made a remark."
"Oh, I see."
There was a faint sneer in Feathers' voice, and his eyes looked grim;
he knew that if he waited Chris would presently explode again, and
he was right.
"Marriage," said Chris, with the air of one who has suddenly lighted
upon a great and original discovery, "is a damned awful gamble, and
that's a fact."
Feathers stopped to knock the ashes from his pipe against a wooden
post.
"It's not compulsory, anyway," he said quietly. "After all, men marry
to please themselves."
"Or to please someone else," said Chris with a growl.
There was a little silence.
"Or for money," said Feathers deliberately.
Chris stopped to kick a pebble off the promenade to the sands
below, and he answered his friend gloomily:
"Nobody but a fool would marry a woman for her money."
Feathers stared. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but closed it
again with a little snap.
After all, what use was it to raise an argument? He did not want to
quarrel with Chris, and yet he knew that he had never had a better
reason for so doing.
"When are you coming back to town?" Chris asked after a moment.
"Don't know; haven't made up my mind yet." Feathers looked at
Chris quizzically. "Suppose you'll rather drop out of things now, eh?"
he asked.
Chris stared.
"Drop out? Good Lord, no!" he flushed angrily. "What do you mean—
104

because I happen to have got married?"

"It generally makes a difference." Feathers said lightly.
"Not in my case. Marie's a sensible girl—dash it! I've known her all
my life."
"Yes, that's the trouble."
"What the deuce do you mean?"
"I mean that you're rather apt to lose sight of the fact that she's no
longer a kind of sister to you, but a wife," Feathers said quietly.
"Also, I suppose that when you were kids together she spoilt you like
the devil, and it looks as if she means to go on spoiling you."
Chris laughed in amusement.
"Spoils me—Marie spoils me! That's good!" He really thought it was.
Like most men whose chief ambition it is to see that they get their
own way no matter at what inconvenience to others, he was quite
unconscious of the fact; he really thought he was rather an unselfish
man; he certainly considered that perhaps with the exception of the
little scene this morning when he had lost his temper he had treated
Marie rather well.
"You don't understand women, my dear chap," he said cheerily.
Feathers looked at him squarely.
"Do you?" he asked.
Chris looked rather nonplussed.
"Well, perhaps I don't," he admitted. "And perhaps I don't want to. I
prefer a man's company any day to a woman's, you know that—
except Marie's, of course," he added hastily.
There was a little silence.
"What do you think of my wife, anyway?" he asked, with a rather
forlorn attempt at jocularity.
"What do I think of her?" Feathers echoed. "Well—she's all right," he
added lamely. He stopped, and bared his head to the cool sea
breeze. "Hadn't we better turn back?" he asked.
They strolled back to the hotel together; a perspiring porter was
105

staggering across the lounge with Marie's luggage. Chris'

portmanteau and suit-case stood already by the door.
"We're not going till after lunch," Chris said, "They turn you out of
your rooms in a hurry, don't they? I wonder where Marie is?"
"She's sitting over there in the window." Feathers answered.
He had seen Marie as soon as they entered the lounge—seen
something in her face, too, that pierced his heart like a knife as he
turned deliberately and walked away from her.
He had been prepared to dislike Christopher's wife, because he had
thought she would rob him of his friend, but in the last three weeks
something seemed to have played pitch and toss with all his
preconceived ideas of marriage and women.
He went out into the garden, and stayed there until he knew that
lunch must be almost finished, then he strolled in.
Chris and his wife were in the lounge, dressed for traveling. Marie
was looking anxiously towards the door as he came slowly forward
and her wistful face lightened as she saw him.
"Where have you been?" Chris demanded. "We're just off, you old
rotter."
"I didn't know it was so late." He looked at Marie. "I hope you'll have
a pleasant journey back," he said. The words sounded absurdly
formal and unlike him, and the girl's face flushed in faint perplexity.
"Thank you, I hope we shall."
There was a taxi at the door, piled with luggage; Mrs. Heriot was
close by, dressed in a very smart tweed costume, and with her golf
clubs slung over her shoulder.
She looked at Chris commiseratingly.
"You poor dear, going back to smoky old London! Don't you wish you
were coming out on the downs with me?"
Chris laughed, and held out his hand. 106

"Good-bye, Mrs. Heriot. Good-bye and—what do people say?—until

our next merry meeting!"
She shook hands with Marie.
"Good-bye, you dear thing, and I'm so glad you're so much better."
Feathers was standing by the door of the taxi, his rather shabby
slouch hat tilted over his eyes, his hands thrust into his pockets.
Marie turned to him.
"Good-bye, Mr. Dakers."
"Good-bye, Mrs. Lawless." He shook her hand in his big paw,
squeezed it and let it go, standing back to make room for Chris.
Several of the hotel visitors who had been rather friendly with Chris
came clustering for a last word.
"See you in town, old chap—cherio! Don't forget to look me up!
You've got my address."
The taxi-driver interposed.
"You ain't got too much time for the train, sir."
"Right-oh! Good-bye." The taxicab wheeled about and out into the
road. A sudden mist blurred Marie's eyes as she turned in her seat
for a last look. She had been unhappy here, and yet—something
within her shrank from the thought of leaving it all behind. She had
grown to dread the future. In her nervous, apprehensive state she
had no hope that this fresh step would be for the better, and she
shrank from further pain and disappointment.
When the cab had vanished down the road Mrs. Heriot turned to
Feathers.
"You haven't had any lunch," she said.
"No, no, I'm not hungry," he said absently.
He walked away from the door and into the hotel. The lounge was
crowded with people, laughing and chattering together, and as he
passed the inquiry desk he heard one of the clerks say:
"We shan't have a room vacant for three weeks. I don't remember
when we were so full."
Was the hotel full! Feathers turned and looked round the crowded
107

lounge as he went slowly up the stairs to his room; strange that it

seemed more empty and deserted to him than ever before.
**********
As the train drew slowly out of the station, Chris looked across at his
wife with a rather nervous smile.
"Well, that's the end of our honeymoon," he said grimly.
"Yes"—Marie had quite recovered from her breakdown of the
morning and she answered quietly enough—"we've had a good time,
haven't we?"
"Have we? Opinions differ, I suppose."
She took no notice.
"I've never stayed in an hotel before," she went on, "so I suppose
that's why I enjoyed everything so much. It will seem very quiet
with Aunt Madge, won't it?"
"We need not stay with her."
"I think we must for a week or two, till something can be arranged."
Chris threw down a magazine he had picked up.
"What sort of arrangement would you like?" he asked. "I want you
to please yourself in every way without considering me." He paused.
"I've got some rooms at Knightsbridge, you know," he went on
casually. "I'm not at all sure that it wouldn't be a good idea to keep
them on for a while."
Marie caught her breath with a little stifled sound.
"Keep them on?" she echoed.
"Yes—they're only bachelor rooms, but I've had some pretty good
times there, and they might be handy until we can find something
better."
"Yes."
"So I don't want you to feel tied at all," he went on. "I want you to
do as you like, you know—have your own friends, and go about!
There isn't any need to worry about money—there's plenty."
"Yes," she said again stupidly; then, "I suppose father left a great
deal?"
"He did, yes. I didn't bother you about the will—it wasn't necessary;
108

but, of course, everything has been properly drawn up."

"Yes." She was not interested; what did mere money matter? It
could not buy for her the only thing she wanted in the world.
They seemed to have left the sunshine behind them with the sea,
for as they neared London the sky grew overcast and large raindrops
splashed down and against the windows.
Marie looked at Chris; the last time she had traveled this way was
when she was summoned from Paris at her father's death.
So much had happened since then, and yet Chris looked exactly the
same, no older, no sadder, though she felt that she herself was both.
"I hope Mr. Dakers will come and see us soon," she said impulsively.
Chris laughed
"I don't suppose he will—he likes a free-and-easy life; he'd hate it if
Aunt Madge expected him to get into dress togs every evening."
"Would he?" She felt despondent; she supposed that she could not
expect anyone to wish to come and visit her.
She thought of her friend, Dorothy Webber, with envy. If only she
had been like Dorothy, full of go and a great sportswoman, Chris
would at least have been pleased to be with her for the sake of
mutual tastes and agreeable companionship.
It was raining fast when they got to London; a crowd of people had
come up on their train, and it was difficult to get a taxi.
Chris began to get irritable.
"Didn't you tell Aunt Madge what time we should arrive?" he asked.
"She might have sent the car."
"I didn't know what time—you hadn't decided when I wrote," Marie
answered anxiously. "I am sure she would have sent the car if she
had known."
Chris looked inclined to be sulky.
"I shall buy one of my own, and be independent." he said with
109a

frown.
But they secured a taxi in the end, and Chris slammed the door and
sat down beside his wife with a sigh of relief.
"I loathe traveling," he said.
She looked at him in surprise.
"I thought you liked it; you used to do a great deal before—before
we were married."
He laughed.
"Oh, well, a bachelor's travels are rather different to taking a wife
and half a dozen trunks along. It's the luggage that's such a bother."
He sat up with sudden energy. "Marie Celeste, what are you going to
tell Aunt Madge?"
"What do you mean?" But she knew quite well.
He avoided her eyes.
"You know what I mean. I don't want to talk about it, but it's just as
well for us both to tell the same story, or at least not to contradict
one another."
"I see. Well—I wasn't going to tell her anything. Why should I? It's
nothing to do with Aunt Madge."
He colored a little.
"Very well, if that is your wish; and—Marie Celeste?"
"Yes."
"I hope you've forgotten about this morning. I lost my temper; I
ought not to have spoken to you as I did."
"It's all quite forgotten," she assured him steadily.
His face cleared.
"That's good; I don't want the old lady to think things are wrong
already."
Marie almost laughed. Wrong already! He spoke as if the scene in
her room that morning had been the first storm to mar a
honeymoon of otherwise complete happiness.
Chris let down the window with a run and looked out.
"Here we are!" he said cheerily. "And there she is at the window."
He waved his hand to Miss Chester, and turned to see about the
luggage. Marie went on into the house.
"My darling child!" She was clasped in Miss Chester's arms and
110

fervently kissed. "How glad I am to see you again! And have you
had a happy time?"
"Of course we have!" Marie bent to kiss her again to end further
questioning, and they went into the drawing-room together.
Marie looked round her with sad eyes. It seemed such an eternity
since she was here—such an eternity since that Sunday afternoon
when Chris had asked her to go for a walk with him and the walk
had ended in that never-to-be-forgotten moment outside
Westminster Abbey.
Then she had looked forward to radiant days of happiness, but she
felt now that ever since she had been going backwards, retreating
from the golden hopes that for a little while had dazzled her eyes.
Miss Chester was pouring out tea and talking all the time.
"I have had your rooms all redecorated, Marie, because—though of
course I know you will get a house of your own before long—I like
to think that you will often come here, you and Chris."
"Yes, dear, thank you."
Marie tried to speak enthusiastically, but it was a poor little failure,
and Miss Chester looked up quickly, struck by some new tone in the
girl's voice.
But she made no comment until later on when she and Chris were
alone for a moment, and then she said anxiously:
"Chris, I don't think you ever told me how very ill Marie was after
that accident in the sea?"
"How ill?" he echoed. "She wasn't very ill; she had to stay in her
room for a few days of course, but she wasn't really ill. Aunt Madge.
What do you mean?"
"My dear boy! When she is such a shadow! Why, there is nothing of
her, and her poor little face is all eyes! She looks to me as if she is
recovering from a terrible illness."
Chris smiled rather uneasily.
"You're over-anxious," he said. "The doctor assured me that she was
all right, and I think she is. Has she complained about not feeling
111

well to you?"
"Oh, no, nothing, but I haven't seen her for a month, and perhaps I
notice the change more than you do. Chris——" He had turned to
go, but stopped when she spoke his name.
"Yes, Aunt Madge."
"Come here, Chris."
He came back reluctantly, and Miss Chester rose from her chair, and,
laying her hands on his shoulders, looked earnestly into his eyes.
"There isn't anything wrong, Chris? You're both quite happy?"
"Of course!" But he, too, bent and kissed her as Marie Celeste had
done to avoid further questioning.
112
 CHAPTER X
"The hour which might have been, yet might not
be.
Which man's and woman's heart conceived and
bore.
Yet whereof life was barren, on what shore
Bides it the breaking of Time's weary sea?"

MARIE had only been back in London two days when she realized
that, as far as Chris was concerned, she need expect nothing more
than the casual affection which he had always bestowed upon her.
He was just the Chris she had always known—selfish and
irresponsible and wholly charming.
Sometimes she despised herself because, no matter how indifferent
he might be to her, her love in no way lessened. She felt that it
would be much more for her happiness and much more sensible if
she could grow as indifferent to him as he was to her.
Time after time she told herself that she would not care, that she
would not let him hurt her, but it was useless. The first cold glance,
the first small act of neglect, and the old wound ached afresh.
Her greatest fear was that Miss Chester would know the real state of
things. When she was present Marie always exerted every nerve to
appear bright and happy; she went out of her way to talk to Chris.
She was determined that the old lady should believe they had had a
thoroughly good time and were perfectly happy.
She did not understand that eyes that appear woefully blind can
often see the clearest. Miss Chester had long ago discovered for
herself that this marriage, like many others she had seen during her
life, was turning out a failure.
She was too wise to let either of them know of her discovery, but
she shed many tears over it in secret and lay awake night after night
wondering what she could do to help and put things right, 113 but
realizing that she could do absolutely nothing.
Interference would make things worse. She understood thoroughly
the different temperaments with which she had to contend; she
knew just how proud Marie was, just how obstinate Chris could be.
She could only wait and hope with a trembling heart.
Chris seemed to have drifted back to his bachelor days; he came
and went as he chose, and he said no more about looking for a
house wherein he and Marie might make their home.
Miss Chester spoke of it once to Marie.
"My dear, don't you think you should be looking about for a house of
your own? I love you to be with me, but I am sure that Chris must
want his own home—it's only natural."
"I think Chris is quite happy, Aunt Madge," Marie answered, in the
too quiet voice in which she always spoke to Miss Chester.
"Quite happy! But what about you?" the old lady asked indignantly.
"Every wife wants her own home; it's only natural, and there's plenty
of money for you to have a delightful home."
"Money again!" Marie thought wearily. What great store everyone
seemed to set by it!
Chris had opened a banking account for her, and told her to draw
what she wanted and amuse herself; but Marie had not yet learnt
the value of money, and beyond spending a few pounds on clothes
and odds and ends she had not touched it.
He had given her a diamond engagement ring and another beautiful
ring when they were married. One afternoon when they were
lunching alone. Miss Chester being absent, he said to Marie
suddenly:
"Wouldn't you like a pearl necklace or something?" The vagueness of
the question made her smile; there was something so boyish about
it, so very like the Chris she had known years ago.
"I should if you think I ought to have one," she answered.
"I don't know about 'ought to,'" he said, dubiously. "But other 114

women have trinkets and things, and pearls would suit you, you're
so dark! We'll go out this afternoon and look at some, shall we?"
She flushed with pleasure; it was so seldom that Chris suggested
taking her anywhere. She ran upstairs to dress, feeling almost
happy; she was so easily influenced by Chris—a kind word or
thought from him kept her content for days, just as a cross word or
an act of indifference carried her down to the depths of despair.
It was a sunny afternoon, and a heavy shower of rain overnight had
washed the smoky face of London clean and left it with a wonderful
touch of brightness.
"Are we going in the car?" Marie asked, and was glad when Chris
said that he would rather walk if she did not mind.
They set off together happily enough. It was on occasions like this
that Marie tried to cheat herself into the belief that Chris did care for
her a little after all, and that it was only his awkward self-
consciousness that prevented him from letting her know of it— a
happy illusion while it lasted!
It was after they had bought the necklace—a charming double row
of beautiful pearls—and were having tea that Chris said suddenly:
"Marie Celeste, why don't you go about more and enjoy yourself?"
She looked up with startled eyes.
"Go about!" she echoed quietly. "Do you mean by myself?"
He did not seem to hear the underlying imputation, and answered
quite naturally: "No, can't you make friends or ask some people to
stay with you? You must have friends."
The color rushed to her face.
"I had some friends at school," she answered, "but not many. I don't
think I was very popular. There's Dorothy Webber——"
"Well, why not ask her to stay with you?"
There was a little silence.
"I don't think I want her," Marie said slowly. Dorothy Webber and
115

Mrs. Heriot had always somehow gone together in her mind; they
were both essentially men's women—very gay and companionable—
and though she would not have admitted it for the world, Marie did
not want Chris to meet Dorothy Webber.
"Oh, well, if you don't want her, of course that alters things," he said
with a shrug. "But it seems a pity not to have a better time, Marie
Celeste! Most women with your money would be setting the Thames
on fire."
"Would they? What would they do?"
He looked nonplussed.
"Well, they'd go to theatres and dances, and play cards, and things
like that," he explained vaguely. "I don't know much about women,
but I do know that not many of them stay at home as much as you
do."
She sat silent for a moment, then she said: "You mean that it would
please you if—if I was more like other women?"
He laughed apologetically. "Well, I should feel happier about you,"
he admitted awkwardly. "It's not natural for a girl of your age to
stick at home so much. Time enough in another thirty years."
"Yes." Marie remembered with a little ache the kindly warning which
Feathers had several times tried to give her.
"Chris wants a woman who can be a pal to him—to go in for things
that he likes—and you could, if you chose to try!" He had said just
those words to her many times, and though in her heart she had
always known that the first part of them was true, she felt herself
utterly incapable of following his advice.
If she had loved Chris less it would have been far easier for her, but
as it was, she was always fearful of annoying him, or of wearying
him with her attempts to be what he wanted.
"There's no need to stay in town all the autumn, either," Chris went
on, after a moment. "Why not go down to the country, or to
somewhere you've never been? There must be heaps of places you
know nothing about, Marie Celeste."
She laughed at that. 116

"Why, I've never been anywhere, except to school in France, and to

Brighton or Bournemouth for summer holidays."
Chris lit a cigarette.
"If you could get a friend to go with you, there's no reason why you
shouldn't go to Wales or Ireland," he said, his eyes bent on his task.
Marie stared at him; she could feel the color receding from her
cheeks. So he did not mean to take her himself!
She became conscious that she had been sitting there dumbly for
many minutes; she roused herself with an effort.
"Perhaps I will—later on," she said.
The pearl necklace of which she had been so proud a moment ago
felt like a leaden weight on her throat. She wondered hopelessly
what he was going to say next, and once again the little streak of
happiness that had touched her heart faded and died away.
And then all at once she seemed to understand; perhaps the steady
way in which he kept his eyes averted from her told her a good deal,
or perhaps little Marie Celeste was growing wise, for she leaned
towards him and said rather breathlessly trying to smile:
"You are very anxious to dispose of me! Why don't you find a friend
and go away for the autumn too?"
She waited in an agony for his reply, and it seemed a lifetime till it
came.
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