Re: obfuscating / protecting LUA code

[David Given <dg@...>]

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Shmuel Zeigerman wrote:
[...]
> While this method should work, it requires dedicated effort in
> programming main application. The interesting question is: whether it's
> feasible to write an "obfuscator" which is fully automatic and able to
> correctly process *any* Lua program.

That'd be my attitude, I'm afraid. Why spend time making programs harder to
run? The only kind of people who'd be stopped by obfuscation are the kind of
people who'd be stopped by a simple license agreement. All obfuscation does is
 to waste valuable coder resources and make your life harder (because it's yet
another incompatible patch on top of the standard Lua codebase).

I'd suggest compiling all your binaries with luac -s, so there isn't any
source code lying around, and if you're *really* paranoid tweaking the headers
to stop them looking like Lua binaries. Beyond that, I reckon you're just
wasting your time.

(Besides, I'm afraid that any business plan that relies on secret algorithms
is probably doomed from the start. That kind of thing just doesn't work.)

- --
+- David Given --McQ-+ "If you're up against someone more intelligent
|  dg@cowlark.com    | than you are, do something insane and let him think
| (dg@tao-group.com) | himself to death." --- Pyanfar Chanur
+- www.cowlark.com --+
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