Quickstart

Get started with IronBrew 2 in minutes and obfuscate your first Lua script

This guide will help you obfuscate your first Lua script with IronBrew 2.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have:

• IronBrew 2 CLI installed (installation guide)
• A Lua 5.1 script to obfuscate
• luac and luajit available in your PATH

Obfuscate your first script

1. Create a test Lua script

   Create a simple Lua script to test the obfuscator:

   test.lua

   -- Simple test script
   local function greet(name)
       return "Hello, " .. name .. "!"
   end
   
   local message = greet("World")
   print(message)
   
   -- Some basic math
   local sum = 0
   for i = 1, 10 do
       sum = sum + i
   end
   print("Sum:", sum)
   
2. Run the obfuscator

   Execute IronBrew 2 CLI with your script as input:

   ./IronBrew2CLI test.lua
   

   You should see output similar to:

   Checking file...
   Stripping comments...
   Compiling...
   Obfuscating...
   Serializing...
   Minifying...
   Watermark...
   Done!
   
3. Check the output

   IronBrew 2 creates an out.lua file containing your obfuscated code:

   ls -lh out.lua
   

   The output file will be significantly larger than the input due to the VM wrapper and obfuscation layers.

4. Test the obfuscated script

   Run the obfuscated script to verify it works correctly:

   lua out.lua
   

   Expected output:

   Hello, World!
   Sum:    55
   

   The obfuscated code produces identical results to the original script.

What happened?

IronBrew 2 transformed your Lua script through several stages:

1. Comment stripping

   Removes comments using LuaSrcDiet while preserving code structure

2. String encryption

   Encrypts string constants (if enabled in settings)

3. Bytecode compilation

   Compiles the Lua source to Lua 5.1 bytecode using luac

4. Bytecode deserialization

   Parses the bytecode into an internal representation (Chunk, Instruction objects)

5. Control flow obfuscation

   Applies control flow transformations to make the code harder to analyze

6. VM generation

   Wraps the bytecode in a custom virtual machine with randomized instruction encoding

7. Minification

   Compresses the output using LuaSrcDiet with maximum optimization

Default configuration

The CLI uses these default settings from ObfuscationSettings:

ObfuscationSettings (default)

EncryptStrings = false
EncryptImportantStrings = false
ControlFlow = true
BytecodeCompress = true
DecryptTableLen = 500
PreserveLineInfo = false
Mutate = true
SuperOperators = true
MaxMegaSuperOperators = 120
MaxMiniSuperOperators = 120
MaxMutations = 200

The default configuration provides strong obfuscation with good performance. Control flow obfuscation, mutations, and super operators are all enabled by default.

Next steps

CLI Reference

Learn about all CLI options and how to customize obfuscation

Configuration

Understand ObfuscationSettings and fine-tune the obfuscation process

Core Concepts

Dive deep into how VM-based obfuscation works

API Reference

Use IronBrew 2 programmatically in your C# projects

Common issues

Error: luac not found

Make sure luac is installed and available in your PATH:

which luac
luac -v

Install Lua 5.1 if needed. See the installation guide for platform-specific instructions.

Error: luajit not found

IronBrew 2 uses LuaJIT for preprocessing. Install it:

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install luajit

macOS

brew install luajit

Output is too large

The VM wrapper adds significant overhead. This is normal for VM-based obfuscation. To reduce size:

• Disable string encryption
• Reduce MaxMegaSuperOperators and MaxMiniSuperOperators
• Set BytecodeCompress = true (default)

Script runs slowly

VM-based obfuscation adds runtime overhead. For better performance:

• Reduce MaxMutations
• Disable ControlFlow for performance-critical sections
• Use selective obfuscation on sensitive code only