What about products like CPANEL, how do they do it?
There must be some standard usage already with Perl
being as prevalent as it is.
Currently we've separated our perl code out onto its own server
and use proxies to get to and fro.
It keeps a level of protection on our code.
We just serve the output to our clients instead.
Obviously it means we have an overhead to maintain, but our code
is worth it to us.
Originally it was written in php, I had to migrate it all. Was easy
with perl.
Security seems to be such a big issue in so many areas besides
the code even, that one just settles for the best one can do.
Keeping control of the code seems to be the most secure approach
in my mind. Once you give it to someone else, given enough time
they will "figure it out".
Same is true with security everywhere, banks, homes, dvds, etc...
Thanks,
Boysenberry
boysenberrys.com | habitatlife.com | selfgnosis.com
On Aug 25, 2006, at 2:00 PM, David Nicol wrote:
I think that if obfuscating the source code (by compiling or
encrypting or whatever) is a high priority for you, then Perl may not
be the best choice of language for your software. And even for Java
there are decompilers and for PHP the code must be unencrypted to
run. So maybe C is the best choice.
Bleach.pm is pretty fun, as are the other ones like it. Making all
the
variable names difficult and easy-to-confuse; adding garbage that
looks
like code and making the code look like garbage; there is a lot of
room
to improve code obfuscators. Obfuscation and pretty-printing are
two sides
of the same problem. Why don't people decompile and disassemble as
much
as they used to? It's difficult. Obfuscation works the same way.
At my company, we wound up distributing a demonstration of a system
that
was largely written in perl as a locked VMware virtual machine in
order to
draw a clear box around it. Sure someone who was knowlegable w/
vmware
would be able to reset the config password on the virtual bios and
so on, but
the line would have been crossed, as surely as removing the hard
drive and
mounting it in another system would have.
