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You seem to have not heard of the field of software reverse-engineering. If you think obfuscated JS is hard to understand, keep in mind that people like DVD Jon
by yid 15y ago
You seem to have not heard of the field of software reverse-engineering. If you think obfuscated JS is hard to understand, keep in mind that people like DVD Jon typically reverse-engineer algorithms out of optimized assembly.
- esrauch 15y agoYou are completely making assumptions about who I am and what my comment means outside of what is literally there in the text of it. I never said you can't get algorithms out of obfuscated source, I said you can't get variable names. A lot of JS code ends up getting deployed with references to future planned unreleased features. Fairly simple code obfuscation works completely to hide that form of leak. See the leak about Facebook's future integration with some music service that came out from a javascript string without there literally being any functionality to go along with it, among a number of Google+ feature leaks that came out similarly. Obviously you can infer what the variable name might be, but you can't get the original variable name back. Was a variable count or counter? Index or i? In reality I just thought that "Even written from scratch this will not prevent people to deobfuscate it in the end" is exceptionally silly; it's implying that existing deobfuscators use knowledge of the obfuscators in their process of reversing it. They clearly do not, and an obfuscator written from scratch is almost certainly strictly inferior to existing solutions. I decided not to attack someone for being slightly naive and just mention something that is legitimately protected by obfuscation. Apparently that is the wrong thing to do on HN and I need to be snarky to avoid people assuming that I'm a moron.