Michael Warhman writes:
>>
>> The other interest that I have is to be able to distribute binaries
>> only of my STk code (obviously to only specific target machines), in
>> order to protect intellectual property.
>>
Erick replies:
> A way that would achieve this goal (among others) would be to write a
> compiler, but it could take some time ... Another way, could be to write a
> special loader which reads crypted data and translate them in the normal
> sexpr. Of course, you should also redefine functions such as
> procedure-body or macro-body to void functions to avoid taht a user dumps
> your application function by function. It seems to me that it should be
> sufficient and very easy to implement, but it is possible that there is a
> hole I have not seen. What do you think of this ?
Back in the early days of AutoCAD, when Autodesk was selling architectural
and mechanical application written in AutoLisp to run on top of AutoCAD,
they used a tool called a Kelvinator. This tool simply mangled all the
user-defined names in a program and took out all the extra whitespace.
It was technically feasible to go through and unmangle all the programs
by hand, but at a cost well in excess of what it cost to buy the
application ($1000).
This pragmatic approach works if you're worried about piracy, without the
need for a special loader. If you're worried about competitors stealing
your code for use in their own products, you'll need something more secure
than the loader Erick mentions, unless you write your own and do not
distribute it. If the loader is embedded in the publicly available
version of Stk, what prevents an attacker from modifying Stk to load the
encrypted source file, convert it to s expressions and pretty-print it?
Alan
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Alan G. Yoder agy_at_cse.nd.edu
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
http://www.nd.edu/~ayoder
384 Fitzpatrick +1 219 631 5772 or 5273
Notre Dame, IN 46556 +1 219 631 9260 dept. fax
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Received on Fri May 24 1996 - 17:23:28 CEST