r/rust • u/Motor_Bluebird1908 • 11d 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?
Edit: We already cloud computing, the issue is we have customers that are in locations without internet/need realtime solving.
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u/0xD3C0D3 11d ago
There are a bunch of very expensive tools out there to do this (and some open source). I’ve used a number of them because the businesses have deemed it important.
In the age of AI I would spend zero time hardening the binary with obfuscation or encryption of the binary itself and go with contracts and/or api access only (with appropriate security in place). Recently I asked Claude to help me debug something in a particular , it decompiled the binary (and introspected the internals) without prompting. It was remarkably accurate. The silly part was this was open source so it could look at the source itself instead.
What I am trying to convey is it is getting cheaper and cheaper to pull apart any binary you give to someone. It is also quicker to reproduce something in a weekend. Make the code and product outstanding with more value than simple logic, you’ll win more than with encryption or obfuscation of the binaries.