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Can you hide Mathematica source code from an executable software product?

Posted 10 years ago

Given that your customers have a Mathematica license, is there a way to sell executable code to them without giving away your proprietary source code too?

POSTED BY: Douglas Youvan
3 Replies

Rolf [Hi Rolf! How are things going?] is almost correct about Encode.

Encode has the ability to encrypt the encoded file with a key which would then be required to read in the file using Get. Encode also can take an option that restricts it to only be allowed to be read on a specific machine with a specified value of $MachineID. Note that if one does encrypt (or restrict or both) the Encoded file in this way, one still needs to make use of Protected and Locked to thwart (at least to some degree) the ability of the user to reverse engineer the internal code.

POSTED BY: David Reiss

Probably Encode and tricks as David outlined are enough for the normal client. However, the more fundamental problem is that Encode does not encrypt. So by definition it is not safe (see e.g. : here).

The only really safe way (if you protect your webserver from behing hacked into), is to use good old webMathematica, since the Wolfram Language source code only resides on the server, just the input and output is transferred from and to the user.

If you do not mind that your code is in the cloud (i.e., always readable by some system administrator at Amazon or Wolfram at least), the Wolfram Programming Cloud might also be a possibility, once it is out of Beta, of course.

POSTED BY: Rolf Mertig
POSTED BY: David Reiss
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