Free perl obfuscation service

[Liraz.Siri]

Perl readability keeping you up at night? Worried someone else might
one day understand your spaghetti code? Say no more! Your job security
woes are over!

I needed to obfuscate a bunch of Perl scripts a while ago. Now Perl is
famous for being naturally obfuscated, but I had something more extreme
in mind. As the thought of further obfuscating my Perl scripts by hand
horrified me, I looked around for a free automated solution.

Long story short, I didn't find anything decent, so I wrote my own.
It's pretty neat, and handles (almost) all Perl constructs. I kept
working out the bugs until it was powerful enough to obfuscate itself
recursively an arbitrary amount of passes.

Anyway, the pricing for the commercial obfuscation stuff is absolutely
outrageous:

"The Stunnix Perl-Obfus Single Developer License costs $879, and can be
purchased online in our store. May be used by the same user on any
number of machines. Full text of the license is here."

So I turned my obfuscator program into a web service anybody can use
for free:

http://liraz.org/obfus.html

Enjoy!

 

[Apokrif]

Liraz Siri :

So I turned my obfuscator program into a web service anybody can use
for free:

http://liraz.org/obfus.html

Why doesn't it rename variable names ?

 

[John Bokma]

Liraz Siri :


Why doesn't it rename variable names ?

Because most programmers already use obfuscated variable names.

 

[Ala Qumsieh]

So I turned my obfuscator program into a web service anybody can use
for free:

http://liraz.org/obfus.html

I hate to be annoying (although sometimes I can't help it!) but it
doesn't seem to do much.

Input (rather contrived):
#!perl -w
use strict;
my $x = 0;
while ($x < 5) {
print <<EOBF;
I don't think this is obfuscated enough!
Checkout Acme::Bleach or Acme::EyeDrops for really clean programs ..
EOBF
sleep int rand 4;
}

And the output, surprisingly enough, is:
#!perl -w
use strict;my $OO0=0;while($OO0<5){print<<EOBF;I don't think this is
obfuscated enough! Checkout Acme::Bleach or Acme::EyeDrops for really
clean programs .. EOBF sleep int rand 4;}

(that's all in one line)
The only thing it did was remove linebreaks, and change var names, which
hardly qualifies as obfuscation. Moreover, the output is not valid Perl.

--Ala

 

[Wes Groleau]

So I turned my obfuscator program into a web service anybody can use
for free:

http://liraz.org/obfus.html

Cool. I always thought being able to understand my own code
meant I was doing something wrong.

Or is this a way to steal my ideas?

Here's another perl obfuscation technique:
Translate it into awk, then use a2p.

--
Wes Groleau

Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which
the only specification is that it should run noiselessly.
-- unknown

 

[Rene Schickbauer]

Perl readability keeping you up at night? Worried someone else might
one day understand your spaghetti code? Say no more! Your job security
woes are over!

Nice try, but all i get is
---
#!/usr/bin/perl
while(<>){tr/A-Za-z/n-za-mN-ZA-M/;print;}
---

from
---
#!/usr/bin/perl

while (<>)
{
tr/A-Za-z/n-za-mN-ZA-M/;
print;
}
---

Ok, maybe it'll do better on longer programs, so let's try to obfuscate a
more complicated one:

---
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

{
# Generate MD5 sums

print "Generating MD5-Sums\n";

my @flist = `ls *.php4 *.dx1 *.tmpl`;

open(my $ofile, ">", "md5.crc") or die("Can't open md5.crc for
writing");

foreach my $fname (@flist) {
chomp $fname;
next if($fname =~ /md5.crc/);
my $sum = `md5sum $fname`;
chomp $sum;
my @parts = split(" ", $sum);
$sum = $parts[0];
print "$fname|$sum\n";
print $ofile "$fname|$sum\n" or die("Can't write to md5.crc");
}

close $ofile or die("Can't close md5.crc after write");
}
---

and i get

---
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;use warnings;{print
"\x47\x65\x6e\x65\x72\x61\x74\x69\x6e\x67\x20\x4d\x44\x35\x2d\x53\x75\x6d\x73\x0a";my
@OO=`ls *.php4 *.dx1 *.tmpl`;open(my
$OO000,"\x3e","\x6d\x64\x35\x2e\x63\x72\x63")or
die("\x43\x61\x6e\x27\x74\x20\x6f\x70\x65\x6e\x20\x6d\x64\x35\x2e\x63\x72\x63\x20\x66\x6f\x72\x20\x77\x72\x69\x74\x69\x6e\x67");foreach
my $OO0(@OO){chomp $OO0;next if($OO0=~ /md5.crc/);my $OO0O0=`md5sum
$OO0`;chomp $OO0O0;my @OO00O=split("\x20",$OO0O0);$OO0O0=$OO00O[0];print
"$OO0\x7c$OO0O0\x0a";print $OO000 "$OO0\x7c$OO0O0\x0a" or
die("\x43\x61\x6e\x27\x74\x20\x77\x72\x69\x74\x65\x20\x74\x6f\x20\x6d\x64\x35\x2e\x63\x72\x63");}close
$OO000 or
die("\x43\x61\x6e\x27\x74\x20\x63\x6c\x6f\x73\x65\x20\x6d\x64\x35\x2e\x63\x72\x63\x20\x61\x66\x74\x65\x72\x20\x77\x72\x69\x74\x65");}
---
(Above example may be broken by my newsclient)

And it's still running (although i haven't checked the resulting file).

Of course, the "damage" the obfuscater made seems to be reversible without
too much effort - lacking of course comments after reversing the
obfuscation...

You might also work a bit on interchanging hex-code with octal and unchanged
ascii.

Of course, obfuscation is nice. But the *real* art of writing code no-one
can re-use is documented here:
<http://mindprod.com/unmain.html> "How to write unmaintainable code"

LLAP & LG
Rene

 

[Liraz.Siri]

Dear troll,

Yes it does. Had you actually tried submitting a program
to the service, this would be obvious.

From the FAQ "what does this service do":

Obfuscated Perl by:
1. Removing comments
2. Removing whitespace (including newlines!)
3. Encoding strings into hex
4. Substituting all meaningful symbols (scalars, arrays, functions,
etc.) into random garbage.

PS: I know you're not supposed to feed the trolls.

 

[Apokrif]

Liraz Siri :

Yes it does. Had you actually tried submitting a program to the
service, this would be obvious.

From the FAQ "what does this service do":

Obfuscated Perl by:
[...]
4. Substituting all meaningful symbols (scalars, arrays, functions,
etc.) into random garbage.

Not always:

my $foo="hello";
print $foo;

(submit)

my $OO="\x68\x65\x6c\x6c\x6f";print $OO;

==============

my $foo="hello";

(submit)

my $foo="\x68\x65\x6c\x6c\x6f";