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[REBOL] Re: Rebol Product Suggestion.

From: g:santilli:tiscalinet:it at: 23-Jun-2001 15:00

Hello Terry! On 22-Giu-01, you wrote: TB> But then the user could use the interpreter to read the TB> script. However, I think your on the right track. You could TB> have an encrypted script that was decrypted by reading a TB> decryption string from a server.. but that is slow, requires TB> network access etc. There must be a more effective method??? Encryption never gives you security over source code. To execute you have to decrypt, so any user has to be able to decrypt. This means that encryption is just a waste of time in this case --- why not just use compression instead? Please consider that even .exe binary files are "readable", in the sense that you can disassemble the machine language etc. Of course, very few people wants to disasseble and reverse engeneer a big and complex program, and this is what makes people happy about distributing binary only programs. In the case of REBOL, noone stops you from creating a very unreadable script that cannot be (easyly) understood or modified by a human but that can be evaluated by the REBOL interpreter. The alien language script from the library is an example, and you can get even more trickier if you want (e.g. hiding checksums around so that modifing is intercepted by the program). What I'd do is creating a script that takes a normal (commented, readable etc.) REBOL script and writes out another script that does exactly the same thing as the first but is not readable by humans. (I'm likely to write something like this sooner or later as I might need it.) Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[giesse--writeme--com]> - Amigan - REBOL programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila -- http://www.amyresource.it/AGI/