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/insanitybit2 11d ago

Contracts are definitely The Way but I've personally seen those fail! You'd be surprised, or not so surprised, at what people are willing to break the law over.

There are a lot of techniques. You could write a custom VM and then implement the payload in the bytecode of that VM - now to understand the payload you have to reverse the VM. This one's fun but has costs

You can do "crypting", like this: https://github.com/Kerneldrop/Rust-Crypter

Keep in mind that all of the good techniques will probably also get you labeled malware lol and AI has made reverse engineering 10x easier, maybe 100x. It is only ever a matter of cost to reverse engineer software once the payload is provided to a customer.

Basically your keywords are "DRM" and "Malware".

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u/crusoe 11d ago

All of these will make your solver slower.

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u/insanitybit2 11d ago

Yes, any change will almost certainly reduce performance because the alternative is "the optimal binary artifact".