[prog] 'protecting' perl code

[Jacinta Richardson]

G'day Almut,

You're completely correct that I had not realised what exactly you were
talking about.  I hadn't understood that you were talking about modifying
the Perl interpreter itself.  I suspect there are still some significant
flaws in this approach but it's only a suspicion, I don't know enough
about how the interpreter works to comment further.

There was no intended hostility in my previous email.  :)

Presumably if you follow all the steps you mention here, you'll have to
provide the modified perl interpreter with each script (or each bundle of
scripts).  So later bundling with PAR or ActiveState would make sense.  I
wonder how easy it would be to modify the modified perl interpreter to
drop the parse tree after interpretation but before/instead of compiling.
Once you've got the parse tree you've got the algorithms.   Of course such
an attack would involve way more work than most people would bother with.
:)

All the best,

	Jacinta

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