The following material is a crash course in code obfuscation by example.
First, let's look at some reasons why someone might want to obfuscate code:
* Help maintain trade secrets in compiled code (harder to reverse engineer)
* Increase code efficiency (which by nature creates code harder to read by humans...
not really obfuscation)
* Source code compression (Search for the 12 days of Christmas obfuscated code)
* Job security, since only you know what the code is. (Warning:Obfuscating your code
at work for this reason is one sure way NOT to get other assignments, or to be assured an
quick ticket home and let go for bad coding practices. I do NOT recommend this reason for
obfuscating code)
* Obfuscation is fun to say and do!
All programmers are hopefully familiar with typical "Hello World" programs. Let's begin our code obfuscation
example with the following simple "Hello World" program written in C.
