From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id WAA23610 for caml-red; Thu, 8 Jun 2000 22:26:05 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id WAA05835 for ; Wed, 7 Jun 2000 22:23:54 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from miss.wu-wien.ac.at (miss.wu-wien.ac.at [137.208.107.17]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.10.0/8.10.0) with ESMTP id e57KNrL17641 for ; Wed, 7 Jun 2000 22:23:53 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from mottl@localhost) by miss.wu-wien.ac.at (8.9.0/8.9.0) id WAA07564; Wed, 7 Jun 2000 22:23:43 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2000 22:23:43 +0200 From: Markus Mottl To: Daniel Ortmann Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: Reverse-Engineering Bytecode: A Possible Commercial Objection To O'Caml Message-ID: <20000607222343.A5003@miss.wu-wien.ac.at> References: <200006062047.QAA08876@northrelay03.pok.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2i In-Reply-To: <200006062047.QAA08876@northrelay03.pok.ibm.com>; from ortmann@vnet.ibm.com on Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 15:46:06 -0500 Sender: weis > How can companies protect their bytecode, at least their modules, from reverse > engineering? I fear that there is probably no way to prevent this: as soon as you have a virtual machine that can (somehow) decode the byte code - it has to if it wants to execute anything useful - you know the internal structure of the code. Since all the sources of INRIA are open (i.e. also the protocols), everybody could "fake" a virtual machine that, instead of just executing the code, emits the decoded byte code. That's also the reason why you can (in theory) always break any kind of copy protection: as soon as a program runs on your machine, you can track any information about it you want. That may be lots of work (admittedly less work for byte code) - but it can be done. Regards, Markus Mottl -- Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl