full-disclosure - Re: Java class obfuscation

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Message-ID: <200306200141.h5K1fExY000903@caligula.anu.edu.au>
From: avalon at caligula.anu.edu.au (Darren Reed)
Subject: Re: Java class obfuscation

In some mail from northern snowfall, sie said:
> 
> > I was wondering if anyone has any documents compairing the different 
> > java class / method obfusction tools that are available.
> > I am in particular currious to know about the ones that are very easy 
> > to bypass vs. those that are extremely difficult.
> 
> You can't obfuscate java interpreted byte code just like
> you can't obfuscate CPU machine code. The JVM would have
> to be altered to ingest your obfuscated machine code.
> Every type of obfuscation can be defeated as soon as it
> loads the byte-code into memory for analysis by the JVM.
> Thus, you may not have readible byte-code on the disk,
> but, you *will* have it in core.

The aim of obfuscation is to make it hard(er) for decompilers
to work, not make it unreadable.

The trouble in attempting to get from the output of "gcc -O2" back
to C code (in comparison to "gcc -g") is the aim.

Darren