3 ms·

Seems like your issue is with the canvas tag and not necessarily with wasm as you could just do that in JS as well.

• kbenson 8y ago
  No matter how minified, JS is much more easily reversed and dealt with, and won't have the level of same performance that WASM does, so it's a harder sell. It's sort of like saying that shipping an interpreted language file is just as hard to reverse engineer as a compiled binary. Sure, you can make the interpreted language harder to read by obfuscating it, but it's hard to compare with straight up machine code or byte code. In addition, all the obfuscation techniques feed into each other. WASM through a canvas to protect content isn't all that useful if the content is built from JSON which is easily visible. But if that JSON is itself encrypted/obfuscated, that's harder. But determining the obfuscation method from JS code (minified or not) is much easier than determining it from machine/byte code. In both cases enough skill will bypass any mechanism since it's locally running code, but all you have to do is raise the bar high enough to dissuade most. An occassional switch of some underlying obfuscation methodology to make those bypassing have to continuously work at it, and you've got a system that does most of what's needed. In the end, it's just like door locks. There's lots of technology that can be used, all of it is defeatable in some fashion, but there's things you can do to make it not worthwhile for all but the most determined. In the case of canvas content rendering, I think WASM might be the tipping point that makes this really feasible. I guess we'll see, it's not like there's really any way to stop it (nor is it clear we should try).