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SourceGuardian

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 2:23 am
by m3mn0n
How is it possible, in an open source application, that they are the only ones in the world that know how to encrypt codeto run in that particular way? :?

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 6:19 am
by qads
dam it, i want that! but its a little expensive :?. as for your question sami..i have no idea :P.

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 7:58 am
by patrikG
Just a wild guess: I imagine SourceGuardian pre-compiles the code and you'd end up with assembler. That way, the only way to get the original PHP code is to reverse engineer it - and that takes a considerable bit of energy as, to my knowledge, there is no tool out there that does that for PHP (also it's illegal in some countries).

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 8:02 am
by JayBird
qads wrote:dam it, i want that! but its a little expensive :?.
You don't need to pay for it ;) not that i would endorse that kind of activity

Mark

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 10:40 am
by m3mn0n
It's worth the price tag in my opinion. Though there is a slim chance I would purchase such a product. I'm worried it might not work with the new PHP5 engine (throughout the course of it's development), who knows though. If it will, then I will definately purchase this.

If anyone has a php5 beta server, can you test their source code to see if it works as it should?
- Works with any install of PHP past 4.x
- Requires no additional software to run on the server
- Requires no changes to the webserver or default PHP installation
- Both obfuscates AND encrypts PHP files
- Protects your intellectual property and the security of your applications
- Allows you to distribute time limited scripts for shareware purposes
- Allows you to distribute IP limited scripts that will only run on the IP you specify when encoding
I Just discovered this Zend pagethat has some programs that can do the same thing, and are suprisingly free. I'm going to try them out later today and see what happens. I'll post the results here.

It pretty much answered all the questions I had about this too.
How it works
POBS works by replacing User-defined functionnames, variables and constants with a MD5 key of 8 characters. It really removes information that humans would like to have but computers don't care about. It's not ideal but quite a good option in my idea.