Security through obscurity: Difference between revisions

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Obscurity in practice involves intentionally altering the appearance of something to make it difficult to understand, while keeping its end function unchanged. In software development, obscurity is often used because it can be implemented automatically, however it is also possible to apply obscurity in hardware. Companies use various methods to achieve this, such as:

*'''Software refactoring:''' Companies may refactor computer code in production by renaming values from human intelligible to machine intelligible. As an example the function "sendKey~~()"~~ may be renamed to "f_019278~~()"~~ throughout the entire codebase. This does not truly promote security because any person can reverse-engineer what the code does and come up with their own naming schemes for the renamed values. A prime example of this is the video game Minecraft, whose source code is refactored in production. Minecraft's code refactoring has been bypassed years ago and projects such as the [https://docs.spongepowered.org/5.1.0/en/plugin/internals/mcp.html Minecraft Coder Pack] provide environments where intelligible code is viewable.

*'''Software refactoring:''' Companies may refactor computer code in production by renaming values from human intelligible to machine intelligible. As an example the function <code>sendKey</code> may be renamed to <code>f_019278</code> throughout the entire codebase. This does not truly promote security because any person can reverse-engineer what the code does and come up with their own naming schemes for the renamed values. A prime example of this is the video game Minecraft, whose source code is refactored in production. Minecraft's code refactoring has been bypassed years ago and projects such as the [https://docs.spongepowered.org/5.1.0/en/plugin/internals/mcp.html Minecraft Coder Pack] provide environments where intelligible code is viewable.

*'''Software obfuscation:''' Companies may obfuscate computer code by changing the instructions. This may include adding instructions that do meaningless actions or replacing actual instructions with more complicated ones. The end result of this obfuscation is always that the end functionality of the program is unchanged even though the steps are different and possibly unintelligible. This can also involve adding decoy code that has no purpose at all and merely exists to slow reverse-engineering.

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 Obscurity in practice involves intentionally altering the appearance of something to make it difficult to understand, while keeping its end function unchanged. In software development, obscurity is often used because it can be implemented automatically, however it is also possible to apply obscurity in hardware. Companies use various methods to achieve this, such as:
-*'''Software refactoring:''' Companies may refactor computer code in production by renaming values from human intelligible to machine intelligible. As an example the function "sendKey()" may be renamed to "f_019278()" throughout the entire codebase. This does not truly promote security because any person can reverse-engineer what the code does and come up with their own naming schemes for the renamed values. A prime example of this is the video game Minecraft, whose source code is refactored in production. Minecraft's code refactoring has been bypassed years ago and projects such as the [https://docs.spongepowered.org/5.1.0/en/plugin/internals/mcp.html Minecraft Coder Pack] provide environments where intelligible code is viewable.
+*'''Software refactoring:''' Companies may refactor computer code in production by renaming values from human intelligible to machine intelligible. As an example the function <code>sendKey</code> may be renamed to <code>f_019278</code> throughout the entire codebase. This does not truly promote security because any person can reverse-engineer what the code does and come up with their own naming schemes for the renamed values. A prime example of this is the video game Minecraft, whose source code is refactored in production. Minecraft's code refactoring has been bypassed years ago and projects such as the [https://docs.spongepowered.org/5.1.0/en/plugin/internals/mcp.html Minecraft Coder Pack] provide environments where intelligible code is viewable.
 *'''Software obfuscation:''' Companies may obfuscate computer code by changing the instructions. This may include adding instructions that do meaningless actions or replacing actual instructions with more complicated ones. The end result of this obfuscation is always that the end functionality of the program is unchanged even though the steps are different and possibly unintelligible. This can also involve adding decoy code that has no purpose at all and merely exists to slow reverse-engineering.