Being involved in a development of a large commercial software using the mod_perl platform made me look for an effective way of hiding the source code... from the usual non-perl users. The reason for that is that the software (www.opentill.com) is going on the market soon and I have been asked by my partners to look at making the software source code unreadable. I've been using a modified Filter::Decrypt for all other parts - a normal Tk scripts that are running on the terminals... but I couldn't do that with the mod_perl program, because mod_perl doesn't support source filters. I've tried (successfully) a simple obfuscation... but that's not good enough. Playing arround I found that there is a way of encrypting the source code under mod_perl (using Filter::Decrypt)... and that's if you move all the source code to a module and encrypt the module. This is a solution to the problem and I just wanted to share my thoughts here with you. Any comments are welcome.

AN UPDATE...

The reason why I am encrypting the source is because the source has got a key generator which creates the initial installation key. Then the company selling is providing an unlock key accordingly. The software can not be copied to another computer, because the installation key will change. That all is simple thing to crack, but not so simple if your source code is somehow invisible/hidden.


Thanks a lot for all your comments!

In reply to using source filter with mod_perl scripts by avo

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