My manager has a harsh relationship with our client, so he has asked me to encrypt the perl modules I've been working on to prevent our client from looking at them before he secures a final payment of $60K USD. I've already coded a C language perlfilter, which seems to be as good as any such method and works ok. Leaving aside the advisability of having this kind of protection --versus trusting your clients (or lawyers)-- my questions are:

How much effort does it take to get a debugger and peek into the perl interpreter, as it compiles the decrypted file? Is it at least a painstaking chore? Is it worth it to statically link my decrypter module into the Perl binary?

If anyone has done this before I'd love to hear about it.

Brother Greg...

In reply to peeking at the working interpreter by gregorovius

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.