Python obfuscation

[Mike Meyer]

"petantik" <petantik.fool at gmail.com> writes:
> Perhaps a comprehensive protection for interpreted languages can never
> be built because of their high level nature?

Nah. Compiling/interpreting is an implementation detail, and
orthogonal to the issue of "high level". There are compilers for high
level languages, and interpreters for low level languages. At the
lowest level, a machine emulator is an interpreter for machine code,
which is the lowest level most programmers deal with (at least I think
it is....).

If you really wanted "compiler-like" security for Python, you could
write a Python compiler. There have been posts about a compiler that
generated C++ recently, though it's still under development, and I
haven't followed it closely. You might also consider retargetting one
of the existing Python compilers to your architecture of choice, or to
another language. You might also consider translating Python to a
language with similar capabilities for which a compiler exists, like
Common LISP.

Of course, once you've got machine code, it doesn't matter how high
level the source was. That may make getting the source back harder,
but people who are cracking your program don't want to do that - they
just want to find the place where the security happens, and either
figure out the input that will make it happy, or invert the behavior
after a test.

      <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.