[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/