No, actually that doesn't work. ... All that does is ...

Your that is not the same as my cryptographic techniques. I was hinting at something more along the lines of homomorphic encryption, which on second thought doesn't seem appliable to the settings we are considering, since the output of the encrypted program is itself encrypted. Thus, your customer would not be able to understand the algorithm, but would also be unable to understand the result, which might cause you some problems ;)

During my google-surfing, I found the paper On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs, dating 2001, which while implying that "perfect" obfuscators do not exist, doesn't rule out the existance of obfuscators working in practice or under theoretically relaxed hypothesis. The field seems open to improvement.

Antonio

The stupider the astronaut, the easier it is to win the trip to Vega - A. Tucket