obviscating python code for distribution

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Littlefield, Tyler <tyler at tysdomain.com> wrote:
> Here's kind of what I want to prevent. I want to write a multi-player online
> game; everyone will essentually end up connecting to my server to play the
> game. I don't really like the idea of security through obscurity, but I
> wanted to prevent a couple of problems.
> 1) First I want to prevent people from hacking at the code, then using my
> server as a test for their new setups. I do not want someone to gain some
> extra advantage just by editing the code.
> Is there some other solution to this, short of closed-source?

1) If you're worried about people getting hold of the code that's
running on your server, that's a server security issue and not a
Python obscurity issue (if they get the code, they can run it no
matter how obscured it is).

2) Was there a problem 2? :)

As James Mills said, just leave it on the server and then you don't
have to give out the source (and by "don't have to", I mean ethically,
legally, and technically).

You may want to give some thought to scaleability of your code; Google
told their staff to avoid Python for things that are going to get
hammered a lot (although it's possible that Google's idea of "a lot"
is five orders of magnitude more than you'll ever get!!). But if your
game world puts a hard limit on its own load (eg if players are on a
50x50 board and you know you can handle 2500 simultaneous players),
you won't have a problem.

Also, Python doesn't really cater to servers that want to have their
code updated on the fly; I'm sure you could work something out using a
dictionary of function objects, but otherwise you're stuck with
bringing the server down to do updates. That's considered normal in
today's world, but I really don't know why... downtime is SO last
century!

Chris Angelico
happily running servers on fully open source stacks