Perl Obfuscator

[Adrian Howard]

On 19 Sep 2007, at 15:52, David Cantrell wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 04:11:59PM +0100, Adrian Howard wrote:
>> On 18 Sep 2007, at 15:31, Chris Jack wrote:
>>> Can anyone recommend a good, free Perl obfuscator. I had a search
>>> on Google, and there seem to be a zillion out there - but which one
>>> should I choose? It needs to be able to handle classes, packages,
>>> include files etc without effecting functionality/output.
>> Given tools like perltidy, B::Deobfuscate and B::Deparse I'd give a
>> lot of consideration to just not bothering. They just don't work :-)
>
> Simon wins a prize for predicting that someone would say that.

Aye :-)

> But you're wrong.  Merely changing all the variable, class and
> subroutine names can go a long way to making code exceedingly hard to
> read, and none of those tools can undo that.  Why on earth do you  
> think
> that we exhort people to choose good variable names in the first  
> place?

True. But I think that their is a difference between "hard to read"  
as a barrier to general code maintenance vs a determined attempt at  
reverse engineering code.

Adrian