Reverse engineering the obfuscated TikTok VM

There is no legitimate reason for a social media platform to employ this much obfuscation.

If you believe this you underestimate how adversarial the software world really is. TikTok will be on the receiving end of botnets by everything from commercial entities, state backed groups and criminals.

They won't be betting that this stops that entirely, but it adds a layer of friction that is easy for them to change on a continuous basis. These things are also very good for leaving honeypots in where if someone is found to still be using something after a change you can tag them as a bot or otherwise hacking. Both of those approaches are also widely used in game anti-cheat mechanisms, and as shown there the lengths people will go to anyway are completely insane.