[ale] "encrypting" code

[Jeff Hubbs]

The hard part would be making it so that the code's functionality can't
be reproduced simply by reproducing the code.

What comes to mind - if it were me - is to essentially replace the code
with a kind of state machine.  If you were do this, the resulting state
machine might be very large, but we can assume that that's a non-issue. 
Basically, the code's function would not be determinable by inspection,
but that also means that it would be difficult to generate, and you
would probably need to generate it via software.

I came close to this once but what I generated couldn't be called a
state machine - instead, it was a series of logic statements, coded in
the ATLAS language, that incremented binary words expressed in the
language as character strings of ones and zeros.  It was not at all
apparent from looking at the statements what the statements did or how
they were determined.  They were determined from the output of a
Quine-McCluskey-Caldwell-Fielder algorithm with an eight-by-eight truth
table as input.  I had coded up the QMCF algorithm in VAX Pascal.

The impetus behind this was that the HP1000 that the ATLAS ran on didn't
have a lot of memory, such that a 256-position lookup table would have
been out of the question.  Also, this particular ATLAS implementation
didn't even fully meet the language spec, much less have a way to
manipulate bytes.

This was one of the most significant things I did as a software
engineer.

- Jeff

On Sun, 2003-09-14 at 17:51, ChangingLINKS.com wrote:
> Here's the senerio:
> I have a program that runs in .php that will sit on Bill Gate's server.
> If Bill can figure out how the program works, he will outlaw Linux.
> 
> What I want to do is munge the code (remove formatting, change variable names, 
> change file names, maybe even wad the whole program into one file). I need to 
> make the code cryptic enough that Bill Gates (with the help of $100K and good 
> programmers) would not be able to duplicate the functionality of the code.
> 
> I have already taken steps to hide the program's output, and remove most of 
> the GUI. Can someone recommend an excellent code munging program?
-- 
Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net>