in reply to Re: Automatically Converting Perl to C
in thread Automatically Converting Perl to C

First thanks everybody for taking your time to answer my question. My goal is to get from my program something secure, an executable hard to reverse engineer to extract the code. I read that perl2exe is easily reversible, however C executables are much harder to break. In terms of performance I would be very happy if my executable is as fast as my Perl is, I could even live with something that is not significantly slower...
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Re^3: Automatically Converting Perl to C
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 02, 2010 at 01:27 UTC
    however C executables are much harder to break

    That is a common myth, it simply isn't true.

      OK: even assuming that it is equally easy (or hard) to break a C compiled code, I can still benefit from the fact that automatically generated code (in this case automatically converted Perl code to C code) is fairly unreadable. So I am still interested in getting a tool that converts automatically Perl to C I would appreciate any info about this.
        I can still benefit from the fact that automatically generated code (in this case automatically converted Perl code to C code) is fairly unreadable.

        It's not. It's all but trivial for anyone competent with Perl to decompile it to the original Perl code.

        To translate Perl to C automatically, you have to reimplement Perl in C. No one wants to do that, so they translate the Perl source code into something that the resulting program can feed to libperl when it runs, and that's the point of vulnerability if you think you want to hide things.

        In short, it's technically possible, but it's so time consuming and difficult that no one competent to do such a thing would waste the time and energy to do so.

        You're more than welcome to try, but you should believe people with years and even decades of experience with Perl who tell you that this is not worth your time to pursue, because the simple approach offers laughable "protection" and the effective approach will take years of difficult work to make practical.

        Now you're clearly talking "security by obscurity."

        Obscurity isn't security.