in reply to Re^3: Automatically Converting Perl to C
in thread Automatically Converting Perl to C

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.
  • Comment on Re^4: Automatically Converting Perl to C

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Re^5: Automatically Converting Perl to C
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Apr 02, 2010 at 06:16 UTC
    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.

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Re^5: Automatically Converting Perl to C
by ww (Archbishop) on Apr 02, 2010 at 11:44 UTC
    Now you're clearly talking "security by obscurity."

    Obscurity isn't security.

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      OK, then what would you suggest as being the best security solution to my problem? I need to look into a tech solution, and unfortunately the particular niche I am working in needs more protection than the "non-technical solutions" that Dave kindly suggested in this thread. Also, the constraint that I have right now is that an executable needs to leave my hands, I cannot at this point keep the exec on my machine ans allow remote access through an API...
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        I need to look into a tech solution

        The iPad was jailbroken the day after it was released. Do you think you're better than Apple? Tech solutions do not fix broken business models.

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