This may be completly off base and out of my league.. but an interesting question came up the other day. We have some outside consultants working on various apsects of our system here. Our inside programmers have written a lot of code to tweak/get around/"fix"/speed-up various parts of the system. A programmer said that he wondered if the consultants would take the perl code and reuse it back "home". They don't currently have access to it, but they've requested access to the box it's on. Creating licenses aside, I wonder if the following idea is possible:

Create a secure/public keyring pair for the server itself.
Store secure keyring in /root/.whoknows/secret.gpg (whatever..)
Encrypt the perl code as if you were sending it to the server as the recipient. (server@yourhouse.com.. whatever)
Leave the encrypted code where it is. Delete the unencrypted code.
An Apache module, when the server is started, will read in the encrypted code, unencrypt it (via a passphrase that's stored in httpd.conf), and let Apache continue to store the unencrypted code in memory like normal.


I don't know if this has been talked about, recently or ever. If it has been I can see it getting shot down for a few reasons:
People having access to httpd.conf will get the passphrase
A httpd-start / httpd-restart would most likely take an incredibly long time to unencrypt all that code..

It's just a simple thought. I wondered if anybody had any insight. Either slap me and call me stupid or tell me where I can look into this a bit more. ;)

_14k4 - perlmonks@poorheart.com (www.poorheart.com)

In reply to Apache's mod_perl + (gnuPG + startup.pl) = encrypted code? by one4k4

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