Hi there,
I have seen many PHP files which are encoded by some encoding softwares, most of the times zend encoder, I am not sure on this.
How these file are encoded and how these files get executed.
Some examples are PHP cart, downloadable from http://www.phpcart.net/downloads/phpcart_zend.php.
Waiting for the views.
PHP Zend encoding
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Re: PHP Zend encoding
The new name of their product is called Zend Guard. I don't know how exactly the process is done, but in the product page there is some explanation regarding it:
In order to run the encoded code, there is a decoder, which is a program run at runtime, decodes the php file and hands the decoded file to the PHP parser (they call it Zend Guard Loader and Zend Optimizer).Encoding is a process where the PHP source code is converted to an intermediate machine readable format. This format is hard for humans to read and convert back to source code. As a result it protects your code from casual browsing. This means that if people obtain access to your site's code they will not be able to use that for unintended purposes.
Obfuscation is a process where code intentionally made very hard to read as source code or as reverse engineered code. This obfuscation is designed to manage risks that stem from unauthorized access to source code. These risks include loss of intellectual property, ease of probing for application vulnerabilities and loss of revenue that can result when applications are reverse engineered, modified to circumvent licensing and then recompiled. Although reverse engineering always existed in computer software, it is especially important for in computing environments such as PHP which take advantage of dynamic processing of language elements rather than code which has been compiled into machine language before being deployed.