Passes and pass selection

A pass is the unit of work in disrobe. Chain passes implement a shared trait and register a detector that scores how confidently each one recognizes a given input. Ecosystem crates may expose one or more passes plus direct APIs. disrobe auto picks the next pass by comparing detector verdicts, not by matching capability descriptors between passes; see Pass selection below.

Commands and auto-chain passes

The CLI has two related surfaces:

• Direct commands are the operations shown by disrobe --help. They include ecosystem command families such as py, native, and jvm, plus analysis commands such as scan, frisk, query, taint, and webview.
• Chain passes implement the shared Pass trait and can be selected by disrobe auto. Their IDs are not necessarily CLI subcommand names.

disrobe passes prints both layers. Its first block summarizes direct recovery families. Its second block is the authoritative list of chain pass IDs reachable from disrobe auto in that binary, with an ecosystem and full, partial, or detect-only tier. The standard CLI build at this revision reports:

This distinction matters for reachability. For example, disrobe webview directly recovers Electron, Tauri, and Wails frontend assets, but the standard CLI's chain feature does not enable webview.carve, so disrobe auto does not advertise that pass. Use the direct command for that surface. Build feature selection can change the chain registry; inspect the binary you are running instead of relying on a copied count.

The direct JavaScript catalog currently carries 11 bundler families. The WebAssembly catalog carries 4 direct-helper families; three transformations run through wasm deob, while Tigress-via-Emscripten and wasm-name-obfuscator are classification-only. These catalog counts describe direct command capability and do not add chain pass IDs.

Pass selection

Rather than hard-coding which pass follows which, every pass registers a Detector (chain::detector::Detector in disrobe-core) that inspects the current bytes and, if it recognizes them, returns a DetectVerdict: a pass ID, a format tag, a family (obfuscator-wrapper, packer-archive, interpreter-bytecode, source, container, native-format, or unknown), a confidence score, and a specificity rank.

PassRegistry::run_all (chain/registry.rs) runs every registered detector against the bytes. Six extraction-first passes (nuitka.extract, pyinstaller.extract, pyfreeze.extract, pyarmor.unpack, binfmt.container, sourcedefender.decrypt) are tried before the rest, and the sweep stops early the moment one of them returns a High-band verdict (confidence >= 0.90) with specificity <= 30. A raw confidence buckets into ConfidenceBand::Low (< 0.70), Medium (0.70-0.89), or High (>= 0.90).

A SelectionPolicy then picks the winner among whatever verdicts came back: candidates below its minimum confidence (0.5 by default) are dropped, and the survivors are ranked by precedence::compare (chain/precedence.rs), which breaks ties in order: confidence band, then raw confidence, then the lower specificity value, then a fixed family-precedence table (obfuscator-wrapper beats packer-archive beats interpreter-bytecode beats source beats container beats native-format beats unknown), then the lexically smaller pass ID.

The chain driver (chain/state_machine.rs) runs this selection once per queued artifact, executes the winning pass, and re-runs detection on its output to decide what happens next. A branch ends when no verdict clears the minimum confidence (Stalled), when the same output bytes reappear (Cycle), or when the depth cap or cumulative-output budget is exceeded (CapReached). This is why disrobe auto can detect that a PyInstaller archive contains a PyArmor-protected module and route it through the unpack-then-decompile chain without any per-combination glue code.

Standardized emits

The CLI's shared emit parser recognizes these fifteen labels:

source  disasm  ast  cfg  ir  manifest  sourcemap  symbols  strings
imports  signatures  fingerprints  report  recovery  provenancemap

Commands opt into this contract individually. Where a command accepts --emit, pass a comma-separated subset such as --emit source,disasm,report. A supporting command writes an explicit stub when the requested kind does not apply:

{
  "schema": "disrobe.emit.stub/v0",
  "pass": "beam-lift",
  "emit_kind": "fingerprints",
  "applicable": false,
  "reason": "not implemented for the beam pass in this build"
}

Support is not universal. auto accepts only --emit recovery, and commands that do not expose --emit use their own output contract. --all-emits is also command-specific. Check disrobe <command> --help before building a consumer around an emit.

Error codes

Every failure carries a DR-<DOMAIN>-<NNNN> code rendered through miette diagnostics. Look any code up with:

disrobe explain DR-PYARM-0050
disrobe explain CLI-1            # short form also works