Best way to encrypt a PHP source code

perrohunter

Hi !

This is one of the times your client want's to host the app on their server however you don't trust your client and want to make sure he doesn't try to read you code or modify and such

Does anyone knows a good way to protect my code ? I've googled something about encrypting it with this but I wanted to ask first the experts n_n

any suggestions ??

laserlight

You could look into using tools like Zend Guard.

perrohunter

Yeah, i've look at it, but it's kindy expensive, is it worth it ?

I'm thinking that ofuscating is not enought probbly I need to ofuscate and encode or something :S

NogDog

I don't have any suggestion as to what to use, but I would suggest you take a close look at how the various options do their "encryption" and what impact it has on performance. I've seen some that end up doing several large eval() calls along with base64_decode()'s in order to perform the "decryption" on each invocation of the script, which has to have a negative impact on performance. If you get any trial versions, be sure to do some performance measurements to make sure the cure is not worse than the disease.

nrg_alpha

perrohunter;10882036 wrote:
Hi !

This is one of the times your client want's to host the app on their server however you don't trust your client and want to make sure he doesn't try to read you code or modify and such

I'm not sure if this is a matter of copyrights and who is the rightful holder (my understanding is that in the US, unless the term 'Work for hire' is used in the contract, the creator gets the keep the IP created, while here in Canada, it is not so.. as long as the client pays for whatever IP you create, they have rightful ownership).

Of course, I may be way off base with regards to your contract / situation.. but this leads me to ask: Did the client fully pay for your work, and do they get all the rights to your work? If so, then this should all be a non issue, no? Again, I don't know the details.. so perhaps you have good reason to be leary of handing over your source code to them.

Cheers,

NRG

Weedpacket

perrohunter wrote:
Yeah, i've look at it, but it's kindy expensive, is it worth it ?

That's a question only you can answer. You reckon it's important enough to encrypt: what do you stand to lose if it isn't?