PHP Obfuscators


A PHP Obfuscator scrambles PHP source code to make it very difficult to understand or reverse-engineer. It can be written in PHP, C, Pearl.


Features:

  • Replaces function, class, constant and variable names with non-sense names without affecting functionality. Some obfuscators use a MD5 key of 8 characters for the new names.

  • It also obfuscates function names in strings.

  • Lines concatenation.

  • Comments and indents removal.

  • Excludes particular variables, functions or files from obfuscation and encoding.

  • Creates variables with the same names as functions and vice versa.

  • No changes necessary to be applied to the source code before obfuscation.

  • No changes needed in the PHP environment in order for the obfuscated program to run.

  • Entire code base parsing for syntax looking for code errors.

  • Encoding output in ASCII, European ASCII or UNICODE.

  • No decoder exists, is needed or can be built.

  • Some require an optimizer installed but they preferably don.t and avoid byte-code compilation.

  • Fast execution speed.


Obfuscation process:

  • An exact copy of the application.s source directory is created.

  • Each file from the new directory is opened and PHP code blocks are extracted. HTML parts of the PHP file are not processed.

  • Comments are removed, variables are renamed and then whitespaces are removed.

  • Function and class declarations from the code block are identified and stored in a list to be renamed in a second run through all the targeted files.

  • The initial file is re-written after all the PHP blocks have been processed.

  • After all the files have been processed all the files are passed again in order to rename the detected function calls and class instantiations.


Advantages:

  • Makes it difficult for others to use the obfuscated code and get away with the author.s intellectual property.

  • Prevent others from analysing the code and finding security holes.

  • No need for libraries or decoders.

  • Hard to reverse-engineer

  • Cross platform, cross PHP version

  • Open source

  • No password protection


Obfuscation Tools: