dupey@hudson.cs.columbia.edu (Alexander Dupuy) (10/10/90)
In article <40237@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com> in comp.newprod Tim Brown writes:
Shell Encoder (TM) from Computer Connection
Computer Connection would like to announce a new product called Shell
Encoder. Don't have to give away your bourne, korn, csh, perl, bash
or any other shell program ideas any more!
Computer Connection's Shell Encoder is designed to allow
programers the ability to furnish their shell programs to the
end-user in an encrypted format. This allows programmers to
supply their high-quality products without the dangers of
allowing their trade secrets to be seen, therefore protecting
their intellectual properties.
Shell Encoder is composed of two modules, CODE and RUN. CODE is
used to encode and decode the shell programs with a password,
while RUN is used to execute the encoded shells. Because the
shell program is actually executed by the shell of your choice,
it runs just like it was never encoded at all.
[prices, etc, deleted]
Besides being a rather annoying sort of idea (the great thing about shell
scripts is that you can see what they do, and change them easily, and if it's
so complex, you should probably be writing a C program anyhow) I don't see how
this would work. Simply replace the interpreter in question with a simple
program that tees its input to a file and to the original interpreter (this is
a bit harder to do with /bin/sh, but can be finessed with the appropriate
invocation of chroot).
@alex