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MacroExpressions Products: Snob

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Table of contents
What is Snob?
What is in it for me?
How Snob works
How to configure?
Any debugging aids?
Convincing example
Snob in toolchain


 
Credits and acknowledgments
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What is Snob? ( Contents)

(Initial intro is here. For a brief executive summary click here).

Complete online manuals (large) are available in a new window:

Tutorial
Snob Reference Manual
Regular Expressions Reference

If you distribute the source code of the whole or part of your project distribution and want to protect your intellectual property embodied in the code, Snob is an inexpensive and versatile tool for you to achieve this goal.

Even if you are distributing a pre-compiled library, you may want to obfuscate the names that are not part of your API because relocation tables in the library (and/or its modules) do contain names from your source code.

"Snob" sntands for "simple (or stupid, if you like it better) name obfuscator".
Snob removes comments and replaces meaningful names (identifiers) in your source code with meaningless and similarly looking ones. This makes the code very hard to read for a human being (but not a computer). As a usual practice, a name obfuscator is used when the source code containing proprietary knowledge needs to be distributed. When a reader encounters your obfuscated code, at the very least he understands that you wanted to protect it and that it is not really for human eyes. If he still wants to figure out how the code works, the task is much harder if the names are meaningless.

Snob is freely configurable to your project's programming languages and to your needs in removing unwanted comments and obfuscating names in an unrecoverable way.

This flexibility is achieved by wide use of regular expressions in Snob configuration. Among the many choices in third-party regular expressions support Snob uses arguably the best: PCRE library package, which is open source software, written by Philip Hazel, and copyright the University of Cambridge, England. See ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/

What is in Snob for me? ( Contents)

Here are a few cases where you may favor name obfuscation and comments removal:

Code in a script language ( Contents)

If your deliverable is, say, in JavaScript, everyone can see client-side code by looking at the source of the Web page. Even with the server-side scripts, you do not necessarily want your customer to understand the inner workings of the code.
Sometimes, a piece of your project is just handy to write in Perl or a shell script language. When the delivery time comes, you may regret that you need to expose your code. (Granted, those things are cryptic enough in themselves but there are quite a few fluent speakers of those languages.)
Same goes for Python, Basic, and pretty much any interpreted language.

Compiled code: Library deliverables ( Contents)

In a way, the only case where none of your names are exposed is a standalone executable (OK, maybe with calls to standard or third-party shared libraries/DLLs).
If your deliverable contains a library, the latter is going to have some of the original code's names in its relocation table. And, of course, your shared library (or DLL, as the case may be) exposes names of exported interfaces. If you deliver a static (linkable) library, it has names internal to the library in relocation table(s).

Mixed source and compiled code ( Contents)

A typical middleware deliverable contains a pre-built library (or source code to build it) and accompanying "glue" or API layer such as necessary header files, sample application in source code format and source code helping to integrate your product into your customer's.

In this scenario, you want to be selective and decide what comments to keep and what comments to remove from your source code, which names should stay intact and which should be obfuscated.

How does Snob work? ( Contents)

Snob makes a copy of your project directory tree structure and populates it with processed versions of files it recognizes in the project directory tree.

Language configuration ( Contents)

For Snob to recognize a file, its filename's extension (implying the programming language) must be known to Snob. For a file filename.foo, Snob looks for the language-specific configuration file dotfoo.snob. Snob has natural rules for inheriting and overriding the configurations in the project directory tree; it gives you an additional freedom to configure the same language differently in different subdirectories.

Language-specific configuration provides for complete flexibility by using the syntax of regular expressions. You can, for instance, decide to keep or remove certain comments selectively (such as explanatory comments vs. PC-Lint or other tool-oriented comments, such as, e.g., Doxygen).

Project configuration ( Contents)

Snob allows you to designate certain files as API files; the names there will not be obfuscated and,depending how exactly they are designated, they will or will not have their comments stripped.

You can also describe to Snob a set of words that should not be obfuscated. This is handy to prevent erroneous obfuscation of names coming from any third-party code, and Snob itself can be empoyed as a tool for fishing for those names.

Is it hard to configure Snob? ( Contents)

If you have basic configuration for your programming language(s) pre-configured, configuring Snob for your project (or, it may be said, configuring your project for Snob) is really simple.

The harder part is to get the language-specific configurations right. First, check whether your programming language support is posted on the download page. We hope to post donated language configurations there for all to use.

If you are out of luck and need to create the basic configuration yourself, you have the following options:

  1. Do it, maybe, using an existing configuration as a template, and keep the configuration all to yourself
  2. Do it, maybe, using an existing configuration as a template, and share the configuration with everyone by sending it to snob@macroexpressions.com
  3. Ask MacroExpressions to make a configuration by writing to snob@macroexpressions.com
  4. Stop using Snob

With options (1) and (2), you would have to wade through some regular expressions, which may be even fun.

With options (2) and (3), the resulting basic configuration will be posted online, free to any Snob user. One day you give, another day you receive...

Any debugging aids? ( Contents)

Your best debugging aid is your build environment. If the obfuscated project doesn't build, there must be a problem with project or language configuration.

Your second best aid is your regression test: Make sure the obfuscated project works the same way as the original.

And if you do your language-specific configuration yourself, do it on a toy-size project first.

How about a convincing example? ( Contents)

The source code included in the downloadable C-SLang distribution is obfuscated with Snob. By intention (and by configuration) only private header files in the distribution are obfuscated, except published interfaces. See if you find non-API header files there readable.

How do I include Snob in my toolchain? ( Contents)

You probably don't want to run Snob every time you build your project (such as a post-link phase).
For your release candidate, all you need to do is to run Snob on your project directory. And it is handy to have the snob.exe in the PATH in your system.

It would be wise to build the obfuscated version of the project (if it needs compilation) and run the same regression tests on it as you do on the original project. If the results differ, there is a problem with Snob configuration, which you've got to fix (or there is a bug in Snob itself). Normally, you need to configure Snob only once for your project and then use the same configuration as long as you don't add new languages to the project.

If you have any difficulties configuring or integrating Snob, please, contact us and we will be happy to help.