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Morphing Code to Prevent Reverse Engineering?
ptolemu writes "Cringely's latest article discusses a new obfuscation technique currently being researched called PSCP (Program State Code Protection). An informative read that concludes with some interesting insight on the software giants that heavily depend on this kind of technology."
Form of, illegible code.
Shape of, encrypted executables.
Not sure where the monkey fits into all of this.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Just name all of your variables in Hungarian notation like Microsoft. No one will have any idea what the fuck is going on even if your entire source code leaks.
So you code in Perl too, eh?
Ok, I tried that. It really works.
In fact, it obfuscated my Python code so badly even the interpreter couldn't figure out what the hell it meant.
Maybe I need to improve my Hungarian.
KFG
>>delete all the white space, and comment in Hungarian
Ha, you laugh. At my first job, the documentation for our product (a medical management system) was written by the original software developer - who was Hungarian. Screen after screen, there were pages filled with explanations like this:
LOBExpCode. This is the LOBExpCode for the system. Enter your LOBExpCode here.
NGFTSMapC. This is the NGFTSMapC for the system. Enter your NGFTSMapC here.
And so on. And no, no data dictionary. Occasionally there would be half-pages of attempted explanation in extremely broken English. Even our own developers couldn't tell what half the stuff did. So that's one form of code obfuscation...
You mean you don't know the scope of Tmp, i, and j?! What's wrong with you? Tmp is obviously a global string, i is a class level float, and j is a local pointer to a linked list. Jeez, programmers these days.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
Boy, if only there were some way to unambiguously declare the type of your variable. You could put it right next to where you declare the variable, or where it gets passed into the function. And then, if you needed to change the variable's type, you could do it from that one location. If only this were the case, we could get rid of the ugly maintenance nightmare that is Hungarian Notation.