From: Gregory Millam <walker@...>
Date: 2004-06-02T22:13:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Obfuscating Ruby Code.

Received: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 21:42:14 +0900
And lo, Lothar wrote:

> But you must provide the decryption code. And whatever you do, you only
> need to add one print stratement at the right position to dump the encryption
> key. And if this position is known, the cracker got it.

Why even bother modifying the ruby source?

Create a C extension that defines a "myrequire", or redefines require so that it loads the provided ruby script after passing it through your proprietary decrypting code. Then call ruby with ruby -r mydecrypter.so -e "myrequire 'main.crb'" (crb = encrypted ruby?). The C extension doesn't need to be GPL, as it's not a part of the ruby interpreter, just a compiled .so that's loaded at run time. No need to provide the code for that.

- Greg