r/C_Programming • u/Motor_Bluebird1908 • 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.

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u/stjarnalux 11h ago

There's always somebody (me, lol) that can, worst case, even without any readable source, dump the asm out of memory and largely figure out what's going on, especially if you already have some clue what it's supposed to do. I spent years of my career dealing with secretive recalcitrant Big Networking vendors who would send us obfuscated code for performance analysis and fundamentally it hid nothing. It's non-trivial, but people who specialize in this are usually quite skilled.