I’m looking to protect small parts of my source code from being read when it is installed in other servers. Our created software consists of an engine, which is entirely copyrighted and an open source UI layer, which is released as open source.
That engine works with many API calls to our central server and is encrypted, but if source code of the engine can be read then that causes problems for data integrity when information is sent or received from central server. As a result we need the engine source code to be both fast and not readable.
I know that APC can cache bytecode and is very fast, but can I somehow convert the source code to bytecode and release it that way directly, without needing APC? As in, convert PHP source code to bytecode without requiring to install additional extensions to the other server?
I’m not looking for software such as IonCube or Zend Guard or any obfuscators.
Any help would be appreciated, I read through a handful threads here about compilers and obfuscators, but nothing that seemed to be the solution.
You could use apc_bin_dumpfile to store your files’ generated bytecode and then redistribute it. Other platforms must have apc installed to be able to read it using apc_bin_loadfile.
You could also try compiling your code as a php extension using phc