Thomas Beckmann wrote: > As it has been pointed out, erasing source is a familiar way > to obfuscate source code, we have been using this from time > to time ourselves. Moreover, you can restore an FB2-DB > without sources to a working FB3-DB, but you can not create > it by FB3 natively - that's inconsitent.
> I think we should provide a way to erase source code. It may be familiar, but it's not very good. Decoding BLR is not a hard problem. It seems to me that the fact that no one has bothered demonstrates how few people are interested in stealing the metadata that people are going to all this trouble to obfuscate. I was quite serious in my earlier post: If someone turns up tomorrow and offers to donate the code that allows gfix and/or isql to produce SQL from BLR when the original source has been deleted, what would you say? Now, if you really want to make life difficult for someone to steal your database structure... I've been involved in a project that accidentally came up with quite an effective way to obscure not just their source code, but the entire structure. All the SQL is written in an external (graphical) designer, and this designer uses GUIDs to create object names (saves having to worry about developers wanting to change object names and allows for multi-lingual design use). You should see the code it produces. Yuck! Even better, this process means the BLR is obscured in the same way. To make much sense of the result you need to know how to translate these obscure names into something meaningful. This probably wouldn't be that difficult for most database objects, but the translations could be different with every database so automating the de-obfuscation would be a significant problem (unlike the BLR situation which could fully automated and made available to all at any time). Better still, it is a solution that will work even if/when Firebird moves away from BLR. Someone *seriously* interested in obscuring their source code could do worse. (Of course there are difficulties - debugging etc. - but they are not insurmountable: since every object has a unique name lookups are simple.) -- Geoff Worboys Telesis Computing Pty Ltd ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Slashdot TV. Video for Nerds. Stuff that matters. http://tv.slashdot.org/ Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel
