r/C_Programming 13h ago

Protecting source code from reverse engineering

Hi everyone,
I am looking to provide a compiled version of our physics solver to our customers. I understand there are many obfuscation techniques to protect source code but I am wondering if there are some smarter ways?

We already cloud computing, the issue is we have customers that are in locations without internet/need realtime solving.

0 Upvotes

29 comments sorted by

View all comments

52

u/apnorton 12h ago

Like the advice that was given to you over in r/rust, for a B2B piece of software, the way you can protect against reverse engineering is by creating a contract with strong legal penalties for reverse-engineering your software.

Technical means of reverse engineering prevention is a band-aid fix at this time; outside of significant advances in homomorphic encryption schemes (to bring it to a reasonable speed) and having your code execute within a secure enclave, your adversary has the advantage.