in reply to Re: Re: Re: Decompile Perl2EXE back to original source
in thread Decompile Perl2EXE back to original source

You further misunderstand. That is how perl itself and those modules work. Whether perl2exe includes source or a serialized form of the optree is unknown to me. I'd guess it stores source though since that's at least doable.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Decompile Perl2EXE back to original source
by flyingmoose (Priest) on Mar 30, 2004 at 02:14 UTC
    No, I don't really misunderstand -- but perhaps you misunderstood my reply. Yes, it may include source or an optree, but that is not preventing some sort of encoding in the internal representation, as an attempt to prevent reverse engineering at some trivial level. I'm not the greatest of C hackers, though I am one of some regard, and I would have done something to make opcode (or source) extraction non-trivial. Many of these support some form of Crypt voodoo, as say the docs.
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      Oh I'm sure of that. The perl2exe reference I saw online mentioned that some versions just XOR the source against some key and had a step-by-step instruction process for extracting the source.
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        Per merlyn on that other thread:

        Why? Why? If it's just a bundler, let it be a bundler. It can never be really secure, because I can always single step the program to the point where you call the Perl interpreter's "eval" method with the now-decrypted source code.

        Which is, of course, true. It's all just a matter of effort in the long run...

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