Have you ever wondered if your packaged code could be reverse engineered? Back to source code? Take an example, say you are working for a customer and creating a system that is to be deployed on the customer’s environment. You package and deploy it at the customer’s site. But is it possible that the packaged code could be reverse engineered so that your source is viewable? If yes, are you consciously aware that it is ok? If you run into such a situation and you want your package not to be reengineered easily then what you are looking for is code obfuscation.

Code obfuscation is an intermediary step before compilation. Basically the code obfuscator software kind of transforms certain code that doesn’t alter the program’s output but makes it difficult to understand when reengineered. For example what if the variable names are translated to some random text? That’s one simple example; there are lots of other ways obfuscation can be applied. With J2EE and/or .Net one level of protection is already there since the code would be a .class or binary file respectively. Albeit it is not tough to decompile at least a java class as far as I know. Mocha decompiler is one that comes to my mind immediately. But with script based languages like, PHP, Ruby etc. code obfuscation might be needed if the system is going to be deployed at client/customer site as its interpreted and there is no intermediary file getting generated. Depending on the language, you might be lucky to have a tool to obfuscate or you might have to create a tool of your own.