Forget uMIILs -- why not an 'obfuscate' tool for C instead?

[Eric S. Raymond]

In <6152 at june.cs.washington.edu> pardo at cs.washington.edu (David Keppel) writes:
> Essentially, preform all the optimizations that I can on the C source,
> and  steal liberally from the Obfusacted C Code Contest.

This gives me an interesting and twisted thought. Consider the following
notional man page:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
NAME
   obfuscate -- code obfuscator for semi-secure source code distribution

SYNOPSIS
   obfuscate [file...]

DESCRIPTION
   The obfuscate tool applies transformations to a set of source files intended
to make the source unreadable as possible. The intent is to support secure
distribution of proprietary C source.

   Obfuscate begins by preprocessing the file, throwing away all information
in comments and mnemonic defines. Then it randomly renames all variables using
conventions designed to confuse the eye.

   Next, obfuscate  applies a further series of transformations we shall leave
deliberately undocumented here. Some of these are `smart' obfuscations using
source features deducible from flow analysis.

   Finally, obfuscate smashes all non-significant whitespace out of the file
and reformats it as a sequence of solid-filled 8-character lines.

   Though the output of obfuscate will always compile to the same (stripped) 
object code as its input, the obfuscate algorithm is deliberately
nondetermistic; some of the transformations applied will vary randomly from
run to run.

NOTE
   To make reverse-engineering of the scramble algorithms more difficult, the
source of obfuscate is distributed in obfuscated form.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maybe this is as good a secure uMIIL as we can hope for. I'd write it, but I've
got my hands full with 3.0 news and changing machines. Anybody else wanna try?
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond                     (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)
      UUCP: ...!{uunet,att,rutgers}!snark!eric = eric at snark.UUCP
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