We have a -government- customer that wants to buy our code so they can run the program themselves. We are using some code that we consider proprietary in nature (I.E. we developed internally how to obtain results that they seek) We want to hide that or lock their ability to understand what we do, as to retain other programs with said company - but out of good grace sell a program that is obsoleting so they may run it at their pleasure.
What sort of sneaky sneaky tricks do you guys have to bury code deep?
I was thinking of a pulling the code from a text file (have never done this). But I'm also not sure how robust that can be.
Is it possible to have the "secret code" perform outside of PC-DMIS, ie. create an executable in Visual Basic that performs whatever stuff you want to hide and call that from within PC-DMIS??
Is it possible to have the "secret code" perform outside of PC-DMIS, ie. create an executable in Visual Basic that performs whatever stuff you want to hide and call that from within PC-DMIS??
If you do it in VB.Net it's a piece of cake to transform the .exe back to source code and work out the algorithm.
In general: If the computer can execute it, a human can see what instructions are executed and, with enough time spent, the algorithms used can be re-constructed. If it's worth the time is a completely different question...
Does VB.net have obfuscators? I know there are obfuscators for Java and .NET C, but if they exist for the VB flavour is unknown to me. I was thinking maybe apply obfuscation when compiling and perhaps pack/crypt it using an EXE packer/crypter...
If you can't auto-obfuscate the code, you could at least scramble a bunch of variable names and use some wonky construction & formatting to accomplish the same goal.
There's no way to make it impenetrable, but you can certainly make it not worth the time