Re: obfuscation

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
31 May 2007 02:03:51 -0700
Message-ID:
<1180602230.994309.305530@m36g2000hse.googlegroups.com>
On May 30, 3:54 pm, Zeppe
<zep_p@.remove.all.this.long.comment.yahoo.it> wrote:

James Kanze wrote:

will remove all the names of all the exported symbols, so there will be
no more readable information.


That's what I always thought, but a quick check (under Solaris)
shows that it just ain't true. The names are no longer visible
to nm (and the executable is noticeably smaller), but they still
show up using strings.


uhm... compiled without -g and with _NDEBUG?


Well, I didn't try _NDEBUG, but I did compile and then strip,
and all of the (mangled) names were present in the output of
"strings".

I suspect that this is possibly because at no point during the
build cycle or strip was it explicitly stated that dynamic
linking wouldn't be used, so all of the operations retained the
symbols, just in case.

I obtain quite clean code
under linux... maybe strip -s.


Hmm. I'd tried it under Solaris. Under Linux, strip does seem
to eliminate most of them.

BTW: does _NDEBUG have anything to do with NDEBUG? If it
suppresses assertions, then it can't very well be used in
production code, can it?

they are not, provided you tell the compiler that you don't need him to
preserve the function names. (well, not sure if you can delete also the
names of the function linked dynamically on shared libraries, though...
probably not).


Obvoiusly not, I'd say. Also, you can't delete the names of
types, at least not if type_info::name() is still going to work.


same with assertions... anyway, for the dynamic linking, just my
ignorance on the topic (I don't really know about how it works the name
resolution on a shared library, there will be some version information,
as well as the exported symbols..)


Under Unix, all global symbols will be implicitly exported. (I'm
not too familiar with the GNU ld, but Sun's ld has options to
specify exactly what should and should not be exported.)

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