It's impossible to prevent the customer from viewing the code. The customer has access to everything perl sees, trivially. Once he can see the code, he can trivially bypass integrity checks by removing the die, allowing him to edit the code freely.

Perl can understand two kinds of code. Source code and byte code. It might be a bit trickier for the customer if the program was delivered as byte code (encrypted or not), but I suspect it's quite easy to recreate Perl source code from Perl byte code. It's not even necessary to do so.

I'm telling you this so you realize that any protection you add will be rather easily circumventable. Consider that in your cost analysis.

On the plus side, using encryption to protect your program — as ineffective as it might be — will grant you an extra legal weapon (and thus an extra bargaining chip) in the USA: The DMCA.

In reply to Re: encrypting perl code used with mod_perl by ikegami
in thread encrypting perl code used with mod_perl by moshkod

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