Comment by dbrueck

3 years ago

Agreed - obfuscation is useful for keeping honest people honest. If someone is sufficiently motivated, they will circumvent it, but for the vast majority of people it's just not worth the effort so they'll move to something else.

For example, in our application we have some optionally downloadable content that includes some code for an interpreted language. That code lives on disk in an obfuscated form because we are not yet ready to make the API public (it's on our "someday" roadmap), we don't want to clean up the code for public viewing, and above all because there are different licensing requirements around each content pack.

We looked at various "real" security options and they all have holes, and they all add a ton of complexity. We then also looked at the likely intersection between "people who would pay for this" and "people who could crack this", and there's not much there. In the end, obfuscation is cheap (especially in terms of implementation and maintenance) and steers our real customers away violating the license, and we don't waste resources on dishonest people.

If I'm being charitable, the obfuscation in the article has an out of whack cost/benefit ratio. If I'm being cynical, the obfuscation they are doing strays well into the realm of nefarious. :)

3 comments

dbrueck

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thrashh  3 years ago

People knock on obfuscation but everything in life is based on trust. Locks being breakable, the fruit stand in front of a shop being unprotected, fences being scalable. Everything is a cost/benefit

  • rowanG077  3 years ago

    It's the curse of ideological purity you see in a lot of the tevh sevtor. Most of these types are of the sort that either something is unbreakable or it's useless.