Inside Technique : Hiding HTML/SCRIPT... I think it IS possible!
By Chris Rickard

Well at least for a little while. The Find the Source Code Challenge Take II had a good run, about 8 days total combined uptime before it was beaten by BachusII on Mar 21, 2004 at 6:52:32 AM (# 23) Scripts generated by most commercial protection software packages are broken in less than 10 minutes. It may have even gone on longer had I plugged a hole that was easily fixed. Good eye, BachusII!

I'm not about to make the claim that any hiding/obfuscating technique for HTML or Script can be used to reliably protect script. I'll be the first to tell you that since it is interpreted, the actual real source must be fed to the interpreter to work at all. A slight exception is window script encoded JScript or VBScript, which is merely decoded internally by the script engine. It has a publicly available well known decoding algorithm anyway so that doesn't really matter. There is no way to stop someone from getting your HTML/JavaScript. It just is not possible. This game of course has multiple solutions, one I came up with before releasing it to the public, another discovered by BachusII.

Having said all that (so you don't have to) it is all irrelevant to this game. It is just a game, but it is no trivial puzzle to solve. Its traps were tailored specifically to fool an experienced developer. I believe the one thing that separates this challenge from commercial protection software is that it was designed to use deception rather than any new technological devices. Sure it uses all the common tricks, but only to set up and build upon the deception. Now that you all are (or will be) in on the deception it would be very difficult to pull off something similar. I'll still try though because this is so much fun :)

Here are the ins and outs of "Find the Source Code Challenge Take II".

Next -> (The Code)

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