subject: Obfuscation some advantages and some Disadvantages [print this page] Obfuscation some advantages and some Disadvantages
Obfuscation has been in use as a technique to protect the code that one has developed. Over the years this technique has been improvised with small and big improvements. The popularity of .net Obfuscators has taken an upward swing with programmers and coders as it has become an effective tool to fight against piracy.
Code obfuscation has made reverse engineering economically infeasible for the hackers in terms of time and resources required to break it.
There are several advantages of Code obfuscation which has made it so popular and extensively useful across all platforms. The first and foremost advantage of using obfuscation is that it protects the intellectual property present in the code or software that a programmer has developed for commercial purposes. Obfuscation protects the trade secrets and licensing implementations to prevent any unauthorized usage.
Usernames and passwords present in the code can be easily camouflaged with obfuscation and if any king of data that is crucial for the code is present in the program can be easily hidden and is quite difficult for the hacker to obtain.
A unique feature of obfuscation is size reduction. Long descriptive identifiers can be changed into small one character identifiers with ease. Unused code can be removed with ease and many other code shortening facilities are available in a good obfuscator.
Apart from these advantages Code obfuscation has faced a lot of criticism from several quarters. Code obfuscation just makes the process of reverse engineering a time consuming and resource consuming exercise but given the time and resources a code obfuscated can be reverse engineered.
Debugging is yet another hitch as the code is changed beyond recognition and two sets of the code have to maintained one that is obfuscated and another one that is unobfuscated source code which can easily be understood and debugged. The obfuscated code is generally released into the open market.
Obfuscated code is particularly dependent upon on the characteristics and of the platform and compiler. This gives a lot of problems if either the platform or the compiler is changed.
