Code obfuscation / decompilers?

[pehr anderson]

Dear Josh, 

When I was 12 years old, I learned about programming by
taking apart programms with an assembly language debugger.
It was fascinating, especially the strange circumstances
where people seemed to store encrypted code on disk that
would get decoded in-memory.  

In a few hours of stepping through jump points,
I'd get a feel for the structure of the program,
how the subroutines were organized, and what
the major blocks of code did.  

If you are asking for a code obfuscator, you probably
haven't spent a few boring weekends in your youth
poking through code to learn how it works.
There isn't much that can be done. As long as you 
hand your program to a user, they will be able to 
reverse engineer it and pluck out the interesting bits.
You can work hard to add layers of indirection but
you really can't hide the functionality.

This isn't a python issue. It has to do with the 
fundamental nature of a general purpose computer.
My only reason in sharing this is to give you 
some perspective on what can happen.
I respect that sometimes software needs to be secured
against the user, but you have to focus on a
the specific requirements to deliver a system 
with the right security level.

Are you able to tell us more about your application?
If so, we may be able to offer more useful advice than 
"Obfuscation is not useful".

	-pehr

Joshua Muskovitz wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm sure that other commercial developers have had this concern, namely, how
> do I prevent others from figuring out how my code works (without the
> original source, that is...)?  Do code obfuscators exist for Python?
> 
> Conversely, are there any bytecode to source code decompilers?  These would
> be of great help in convincing myself that my code is relatively safe from
> prying eyes as well.
> 
> All pointers welcome...
> 
> -- josh
> 
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