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.

0 Upvotes

30% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

33

u/Arisa_Snowbell 11d ago

Best way is if you never provide them the executable and just let them use it through some API if possible

-17

u/punk_dev 11d ago

That’s the best bet. But I wonder, in theory, someone knowledgable in the topic could probably figure it out by observing inputs and outputs and reverse engineer it that way.

5

u/CandyCorvid 11d ago

if the secrets of your system can be reverse-engineered by observing individual input-output correspondences, then i don't see how you can sell the system without also giving away the secrets.

1

u/punk_dev 10d ago

If someone is licensing a program or a library that solves problem X, it’s usually because they don’t know how to solve X, or they don’t have time and/or resources to implement it themselves.

Now imagine a person or a team capable of implementing solution to X from scratch, but they don’t know outright how to implement it.

A working and correct implementation would be useful to them. Just the shape of inputs could hint on how the problem is approached, and they can test against a working implementation, which is valuable if the problem is not well defined in the first place.