[JFischel]

Anyone have any thoughts on obfuscation tools for Java? I'm in the process of researching them for work and they all seem to suck balls to tell you the truth.

Here's something else to think about to get things rolling -- how impractical would it be to obfuscate obfuscated code? My theory is that you would get a mess that most likely wouldn't run do to excessive transformation and over optimization.

Josh

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by JFischel:
Anyone have any thoughts on obfuscation tools for Java? I'm in the process of researching them for work and they all seem to suck balls to tell you the truth.

I've never needed one (all my java code is used in-house), but here are a few you might not know about:

http://oikaze.com/~tamada/Products/D...e/index-e.html

http://www.retrologic.com/retroguard-main.html

Here is an article discussing your options:

http://mindprod.com/jglossobfuscator.html

[joltguy]

I've been using JODE for a while. It's a great tool offering multiple variants of obfuscation, it's highly configurable, and it's open source to boot.

[type_r503]

Sorry for the ignorance, but what does "obfuscation" mean?

type R

[Amorph]

To obfuscate something is to make it unclear. In this case, since Java is interpreted (or dynamically compiled) the source is visible to the client - which, if you're paranoid about people learning from your code, is bad. So a code obfuscator scrambles the code enough to make it extremely hard for a human to read without requiring the developer to write code unintelligible to himself, and without changing its meaning to the Java runtime.

You can actually think of a compiler as a type of code obfuscator, since a compiler takes human-readable code and spits out a file that very few people can read, but which your machine can read fluently.