[Catalyst] creating binaries

[Joe Landman]

Octavian Rasnita wrote:
> From: <Wade.Stuart at fallon.com>
>> Take a look at /tmp/pdk/ perlapp exes dump the plaintext while running.
>> This is not a "problem" with Catalyst,  perl is an interpreted 
>> language not
>> a compiled one.  perlapp is there to make distributing self contained 
>> perl
>> applications easier,  not to protect your source.
> 
> perlapp doesn't drop the source code in /tmp. It puts there only some 
> .dll files, and nothing more than that.
> (I am using perl Dev Kit 6.02, but now PDK 7 was just released).

The "source" needs to be obtained somehow and in some state for the Perl 
  program to handle it.

> Can the source code be got easily from those dll files?
> If it cannot be found easily, then I think it would be nice if the 
> Catalyst applications could be deployed using perlapp.

Once your program is loaded, and compiled into object/internal 
representation form in memory, the memory could be forced to disk 
somehow, and a creative hacker can reasonably reassemble your code.

That is unless you have your in-memory image also encrypted with on the 
fly decryption/execution.  I am not aware of any one doing this for any 
language.  Though I could be wrong.

> If a language is interpreted, this doesn't mean that the programs that 
> were made with it cannot be protected in any way.

Define protection.  Do you mean "not copied/looked at/altered" ?

> Or, is there another way of protecting the code from a Catalyst app?

Yes.  Never deliver the application.  Host the critical bits.  Have them 
make SOAP/XML-RPC calls back to your machine.

Note:  this is not exclusive to Catalyst.  This is true with every/any 
MVC framework, and pretty much every language, compiled or otherwise.

> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Octavian
> 
> 
> 
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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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