PHP Obfuscator / Source Code protection

Anon

Does anyone know about a php source code obfuscator to protect the code?

ZEND is, unfortunatly, not an option 🙁

Thanks,
Sebastian

Anon

How do you mean protect?? Do you mean you dont want people to know that PHP is running?

Mark

Anon

Mark wrote:

How do you mean protect?? Do you mean you dont want people to know that PHP is running?

Mark

No, I'm looking for a program that changes variable and function names into something like $xcbioqion, so that I can distribute the source without everyone able to change or redistribute it easily...

khaine

Why would you want to do that?

Surely if you change the variable names to a random collection of characters it either wont work. unless all instances are changed to the same name. or people can just change the names to more logical one using something like wordpads search and replace facillity.

jordan

That's how such an code obfuscator would work, Mark -- by changing all instances of a certain variable or function name to something difficult to remember. And it's very difficult to change a variable's name to something logical when you don't know what the variable is for. And it's difficult to figure out what the variable is for when you're working with names that are so confusing. Understand? Basically the goal of such a code obfuscator is to make the code so difficult to for a person to sift through and understand that it just isn't worth the bother to try and rip it off. Another way to make your code difficult for people to parse in their heads is to strip out all of your newlines, or better yet, to put nonsensical newlines and tabs in the middle of expressions.

pornost4r

Why would YOU do that ?? That's why are these things called SCRIPTS. Forget it. GPL

khaine

OK now I understand the point of the obfuscator. Dont know where to get one though. You could always just right one.

Anon

Imagine you are a company that develops websites, intranets, extranets,
and the likes.

A client requests a work. You do all the work in the project using
the companies CORE CODE BASE.

That CORE CODE BASE has usefull classes for stuff like, abstracting
data bases, functions to generate xml/html markup, etc etc.

You sell a site to a company. With the site-specific code you also
deliver your cored code that is in use.

Now, your client HAS ACCESS TO YOUR CODE BASE.

Imagine they hire some company for maintenance. That companie now
can access all your code, and even use it in their own projects.

Your competition will have the tools you have spent time and money
building.

With Zope Encoder, this DOES NOT HAPPEN. Your code is transformed into
a binary form, and Zend Optmizer [ wich is free ] will re-translate that
into php code, and let PHP parse it. Besides of improving speed a bit.

This way, you also avoid what happens when some curious dewd on the
client company goes and messes the code. This way, they can't do it,
so you wont get any calls saying that the site is down.. less time
fixing what you didn't make wrong.

GPL is nice, but not perfect, neither it is apliable to everything.
Flamebait?