From: Philip Mateescu <philip@...>
Date: 2002-04-21T08:09:17+09:00
Subject: Re: crypting ruby source

> >
> I'm not sure of the context you are working in -- for example, how will
> it be decrypted afterwords?  Via a user-supplied key, or is it to be
> self decrypting?

Well, both two scripting engines from microsoft also have an encoded
version: JScript.Encoded and VBScript.Encoded. Encoded script is just a
simple hashing, and I think is as easy to write a decoder as it is to search
google for one and then download it.

However, one interesting thing about it is that the scripting engine already
contains the *.Encoded "language" so execution is as fast as the regular
one.

It would be nice if ruby would offer the option to decrypt a ruby source on
the fly, using a custom client library. For example,

ruby --decrypt=rot13 myfile.rbe

where rot13 is a library (rot13.dll or rot13.so) provided by the user.

This way, users could choose the level of protection they want for their
programs, and it would make a little bit harder to guess the code :))

philip