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I'm planning to build a 3d game using html5 canvas, which is javascipt API. I'm a noob who doesn't know anything about Javascript. From what I heard, every javascript code line will be visible to users like html. Does it mean the entire game that is built using Javascript API such as html5 canvas will necessarily become open source by its nature? I'm worried if someone can copy and paste the core mechanics of my game.
Copyright still applies even if you can see the code. Just as you can read the text of a book doesn't mean you can (legally) photocopy it and sell it to everyone.
Normally, Javascript is somewhat obfuscated via minification anyway, which makes it much harder to study. But it doesn't offer much protection against others duplicating and using the code. Minification does make it much harder for someone to reuse portions of the code, or modify the code to do what they want, which limits people to just wholesale copying of your site. Copying of the whole site is usually rendered useless by the fact that the frontend (JS) talks to some backend. So for example I could copy Gmail's JavaScript but that won't help me make another GMail since I don't have 1 million servers implementing GMail's database and APIs for it to talk to.
If your game runs entirely client-side and doesn't contact a server at all, then it could be copied whole.
So to summarize:
Copyright still means it's illegal for someone to do it without your permission.
Technically, your best defense is minification/obfuscation and ties to a backend.
No, just because someone sees your code doesn't mean it is "open-source." Open-source code requires a license that states that others may study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.
This may guide you a bit more: http://opensource.com/resources/what-open-source
Edit: but they will be able to see your code. (Well as much of it is HTML/CSS/JavaScript)
Edit: This site may help you learn more about different software license https://tldrlegal.com/
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I need to write a GUI related javascript library. It will give my website a bit of an edge (in terms of functionality I can offer) - up until my competitors play with it long enough to figure out how to write it by themselves (or finally hack the downloaded script). I can accept the fact that it will be emulated over time - thats par for the course (its part of business). I just want to have a few months breathing space where people go "Wow - how the f*** did they do that?" - which gives me a few months of free publicity and some momentum to move onto other things.
To be clear, I am not even concerned about hard core hackers who will still hack the source - thats a losing battle not worth fighting (and in any case I accept that my code is not "so precious"). However, what I cannot bear, is the idea of effectively, simply handing over all the hard work that would have gone into the library to my competitors, by using plain javascript that anyone can download and use. If someone is going to use what I have worked on, then I sure as hell don't want to simply hand it over to them - I want them to work hard at decoding it. If they can decode it, they deserve to have the code (they'll most likely find out they could have written better code themselves - they just didn't have the business sense to put all the [plain vanilla] components in that particular order) - So, I'm not claiming that no one could have written this (which would be a preposterous claim in any case) - but rather, what I am saying is that no one (up to now) has made the functionality I am talking about, available to this particular industry - and I (thinking as an entrepreneur rather than a geek/coder), want to milk it for all its worth, while it lasts i.e until it (inevitably) gets hacked.
It is an established fact that not one website in the industry I am "attacking" has this functionality, so the value of such a library is undeniable and is not up for discussion (i.e. thats not what I'm asking here).
What I am seeking to find out are the pros and cons of obfuscating a javascript library, so that I can come to a final decision.
Two of my biggest concerns are debugging, and subtle errors that may be introduced by the obfuscator.
I would like to know:
How can I manage those risks (being able to debug faulty code, ensuring/minimizing against obfuscation errors)
Are there any good quality industry standard obfuscators you can recommend (preferably something you use yourself).
What are your experiences of using obfuscated code in a production environment?
If they can decode it, they deserve to have the code (they'll most likely find out they could have written better code themselves - they just didn't have the business sense to put all the [plain vanilla] components in that particular order).
So really, you're trying to solve a business issue with technical measures.
Anybody worth his salt as a Javascript programmer should be able to recreate whatever you do pretty easily by just looking at the product itself, no code needed. It's not like you're inventing some new magical thing never seen before, you're just putting pieces together in a new way, as you admit yourself. It's just Javascript.
Even if you obfuscate the script, it'll still run as-is, competitors could just take it and run with it. A few customizations shouldn't be too hard even with obfuscated code.
In your niche business, you'll probably notice pretty quickly if somebody "stole" your script. If that happens, it's a legal issue. If your competitors want to be in the clear legally, they'll have to rewrite the script from scratch anyway, which will automatically buy you some time.
If your competitors are not technically able to copy your product without outright stealing the code, it won't make a difference whether the code is in the clear or obfuscated.
While you can go down the long, perilous road of obfuscators, you generally don't see them used on real, production applications for the simple reason that they don't really do much. You'll notice that Google apps, which is really a whole heap of proprietary and very valuable JavaScript when you get down to it, is only really minimized and not obfuscated, though the way minimizers work now, they are as good as obfuscated. You really need to know what you're doing to extract the meaning from them, but the determined ones will succeed.
The other problem is that obfuscated code must work, and if it works, people can just rip it wholesale, not understanding much of it, and use it as they see fit in that form. Sure, they can't modify it directly, but it isn't hard to layer on some patches that re-implement parts they don't like without having to get in too deep. That is simply the nature of JavaScript.
The reason Google and the like aren't suffering from a rash of cut-and-paste competitors is because the JavaScript is only part of the package. In order to have any degree of control over how and where these things are used, a large component needs to be server-based. The good news is you can leverage things like Node.js to make it fairly easy to split client and server code without having to re-implement parts in a completely different language.
What you might want to investigate is not so much obfuscating, but splitting up your application into parts that can be loaded on-demand from some kind of service, and as these parts can be highly inter-dependent and mostly non-functional without this core server, you can have a larger degree of control over when and where this library is used.
You can see elements of this in how Google is moving to a meta-library which simply serves as a loader for their other libraries. This is a step towards unifying the load calls for Google Apps, Google AdSense, Google Maps, Google Adwords and so forth.
If you wanted to be a little clever, you can be like Google Maps and add a poison pill your JavaScript libraries as they are served dynamically so that they only operate in a particular subdomain. This requires generating them on an as-needed basis, and while it can always be removed with sufficient expertise, it prevents wholesale copy-paste usage of your JavaScript files. To insert a clever call that validates document.href is not hard, and to find all these instances in an aggressively minimized file would be especially infuriating and probably not worth the effort.
Javascript obfuscation facts:
No one can offer a 100% crack free javascript obfuscation. This means that with time and knowledge every obfuscation can be "undone".
Minify != obfuscation: When you minify your objective is: reduce code size. Minified code looks completly different and its much more complex to read (hint:jsbeautifier.com). Obfucation has a completly different objective: to protect the code. The transformations used try to protect Obfuscated code from debugging and eavesdropping. Obfuscation can even produce a even bigger version of the original code which is completely contrary to the objectives of minification.
Obfuscation != encryption - This one is obvious but its common mistake people make.
Obfuscation should make debugging much much harder, its one of it objectives. So if it is done correctly you can expect to loose a lot of time trying to debug obfuscated code.That said, if it is done correctly the introduction of new errors is a rare issue and you can easily find if it is an obfuscation error by temporarily replacing the code with non obfuscated code.
Obfuscation is NOT a waste of time - Its a tool. If used correctly you can make others waste lots of time ;)
Javascript obfuscation fiction: ( I will skip this section ;) )
Answer to Q2 - Sugested obfuscation tools:
For an extensive list of javascript obfuscator: malwareguru.org. My personal choice is jscrambler.com.
Answer to Q3 - experiences of using obfuscated code
To date no new bugs introduced by obfuscation
Much better client retention. They must come to the source to get the source;)
Occasional false positives reported by some anti-virus tools. Can be tested before deploying any new code using a tool like Virustotal.com
Standard answer to obfuscation questions: Is using an obfuscator enough to secure my JavaScript code?
IMO, it's a waste of time. If the competitors can understand your code in the clear (assuming it's anything over a few thousand lines...), they should have no trouble deobfuscating it.
How can I manage those risks (being
able to debug faulty code,
ensuring/minimizing against
obfuscation errors)
Obfuscation will cause more bugs, you can manage them by spending the time to debug them. It's up to the person who wrote the obfuscation (be it you or someone else), ultimately it will just waste lots of time.
What are your experiences of using
obfuscated code in a production
environment?
Being completely bypassed by side channel attacks, replay attacks, etc.
Bugs.
Google's Closure Complier obfuscates your code after you finish writing it. That is, write your code, run it through the compiler, and publish the optimized (and obfuscated) js.
You do need to be careful if your using external js that interfaces with the lib though because it changes the names of your objects so you can't tell what is what.
Automatic full-code obfuscation is so far only available in the Closure Compiler's Advanced mode.
Code compiled with Closure Advanced mode is almost impossible to reverse-engineer, even passing through a beautifier, as the entire code base (includinhg the library) is obfuscated. It is also 25% small on average.
JavaScript code that is merely minified (YUI Compressor, Uglify etc.) is easy to reverse-engineer after passing through a beautifier.
If you use a JavaScript library, consider Dojo Toolkit which is compatible (after minor modifications) with the Closure Compiler's Advanced mode compilation.
http://dojo-toolkit.33424.n3.nabble.com/file/n2636749/Using_the_Dojo_Toolkit_with_the_Closure_Compiler.pdf?by-user=t
You could adopt an open-source business model and license your scripts with the GPL or Creative Commons BY-NC-ND or similar
While obfuscation in general is a bad thing, IMHO, with Javascript, the story is a little different. The idea is not to obfuscate the Javascript itself but to produce shorter code length (bandwidth is expensive, and that first-time users may just be pissed off waiting for your Javascript to load the first time). Initially called minification (with programs such as minify), it has evolved quite a bit and now a full compiler is available, such as YUI compiler and Google Closure Compiler. Such compiler performs static checking (which is a good thing, but only if you follow the rules of the compiler), minification (replace that long variable name with 'ab' for example), and many other optimization techniques. At the end, what you got is the best of both worlds, coding in non-compiled code, and deploying compiled (, minified, and obfuscated) code. Unfortunately, you would of course need to test it more extensively as well.
The truth is obfuscator or not, any programmer worth his salt could reproduce whatever it is you did in about as much time as it took you. If they stole what you did you could sue them. So bottom line from the business point of view is that you have, from the moment you publish, roughly the same amount of time it took you to implement your design until a competitor catches up. Period. That's all the head start you get. The rest is you innovating faster than your competitors and marketing it at least as well as they do.
Write your web site in flash, or better yet in Silverlight. This will give your company unmatched GUI, that your competitors will be salivating about. But compiled nature of flash/dotnet will not allow them easily pick into your code. It's a win/win situation for you ;)
So I have been playing around with a home project that includes a lot of js. I having been using Script# to write my own library etc. Personally I wouldn't write a lot of js if I didn't have a tool like Script# or GWT to help maintain it.
So far it includes these external libraries:
– ASP.NET AJAX
– ExtJS
– Google Maps
– Google Visulisations
– My own library to wrap the above libraries and add extra functionality...
So that works out to be a heap of js. It runs fine on my pc. I however have little faith in js/browsers and I am concerned that loading too much js will cause the browser to die or perform poorly.
Is this a valid concern?
Does anyone have any experience with loading a lot of js into the browser that has resulted in performance issues? I however know there are a lot of variables here, for example browser type (I assume IE is worse than others) the client PCs RAM etc, but it would be good to get other peoples experiences. I would hate to invest a lot of time into js only to find that I am painting myself into a corner.
The more I use Script# the more client classes I have as I move more processing onto the client. At what point would this start becoming an issue? I'm sure the browser could easily handle 100 MS Ajax classes but at what would be too far for a browser?
NOTE: I am not concerned about the actual js file sizes but more the runtime environment that gets loaded.
There is nothing wrong with having large number of js files or big js files, the project currently am working on got more than 60 core framework libraries and 30 of each module got average of 5 to 6 js files.
So the only concern is how you design your website that make use of the JS best practices & optimization techniques. like
Minimize the JS using YUI or any other compression libraries to address the download size issues.
Enable proper caching in your webserver to reduce the file downloads.
Put your javascript in the bottom of the page, or make it a separate file.
Make your AJAX response cachable.
And finally, design your page that handles the on-demamnd script loading.
- Microsoft DOLOTO is a good example for this one. download it here
And Check out the High Performance Web Sites && latest Even Faster Web Sites by Steve Souders. Its a must read for the web developers. This book addresses all the common problems web developers facing today.
with modern browsers routinely occupying 250 MB of RAM or more, script caching, and optimized javascript engines, keeping the script library resident would probably be negligible added load in most reasonable scenarios.
the biggest bottleneck would probably be intitial load time of the scripts - downloading and parsing them. but once that's done, the scripts are cached and the per-page initialization isn't very noticeable.
I highly doubt a browser would ever crash running your JS scripts, but it will become really slow and may not perform what you want. Most people are more concerned about how fast it runs, not if it will run!
I agree with jspcal, you should be able to load quite a lot of javascript with no problems. The javascript engines in all the modern browsers are a lot faster than they were a few years ago. The initial load will be the biggest issue. If possible I'd suggest lazy loading scripts that aren't needed for the page to render.
Also, Steve Souders has a lot of great material about improving page load times, such as this article, which gives several techniques for loading scripts without blocking.
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/04/27/loading-scripts-without-blocking/
If you're really concerned about performance then I would take a look at your target audience. If you think you'll have a relatively high number of IE6 users then test it out in IE6-- on an older machine if possible. IE Tester is great for this.
All of my web pages use a JavaScript library, to improve the performance of my web page, I'd remove all the unnecessary functions/objects from the library for each page according to what's needed for those individual pages. I'm looking for a tool that can do the intelligent stripping automatically.
Or in the opposite direction. it will do also to have a tool to extract only the really needed functions and objects from a JavaScript library for a particular page.
Thanks for your help,
Yu
This sounds like very premature optimization to me. Have you verified the mere presence of the library functions you aren't using are causing performance problems? I would be very surprised if that is truly the case.
As always, code first, only optimize after you've recognized a performance problem, profiled and isolated the cause.
Making several versions of your javascript library for different pages will defeat caching, and subsequent pages after the first page that users visit for the first time will take longer as it requests each page's version of the library than if there was one shared javascript library already in their cache.
I don't know of anything out of the box, but I would recommend at least first making sure that you're gzipping the output from the webserver, stripping out the whitespace, and forcing the browser to cache the javascript permanently. That way your users will download a smaller file once and not have to download it again. Of course if something changes, you'll need to change the url. You can do this automatically if you're regularly changing the file, or manually if you only make changes infrequently.
I'm working on building a development tool that is written in JavaScript.
This will not be an open source project and will be sold (hopefully) as a commercial product.
I'm looking for the best way to protect my investment. Is using an obfuscator (code mangler) enough to reasonably secure the code?
Are there other alternatives that I am not aware of?
(I'm not sure if obfuscator is the right word, it's one of the apps that takes your code and makes it very unreadable.)
I'm going to tell you a secret. Once you understand it, you'll feel a lot better about the fact that Javascript obfuscation is only really useful for saving bandwidth when sending scripts over the wire.
Your source-code is not worth stealing.
I know this comes as a shock to the ego, but I can say this confidently without ever having seen a line of code you've written because outside the very few realms of development where serious magic happens, it's true of all source-code.
Say, tomorrow, someone dumped a pile of DVDs on your doorstep containing the source code for Windows Vista. What would you be able to do with it? Sure, you could compile it and give away copies, but that's just one step more effort than copying the retail version. You could painstakingly find and remove the license-checking code, but that's something some bright kid has already done to the binaries. Replace the logo and graphics, pretend you wrote it yourself and market it as "Vicrosoft Mista"? You'll get caught.
You could spend an enormous amount of time reading the code, trying to understand it and truly "stealing the intellectual property" that Microsoft invested in developing the product. But you'd be disappointed. You'd find the code was a long series of mundane decisions, made one after the other. Some would be smarter than you could think of. Some would leave you shaking your head wondering what kind of monkeys they're hiring over there. Most would just make you shrug and say "yeah, that's how you do that."
In the process you'll learn a lot about writing operating systems, but that's not going to hurt Microsoft.
Replace "Vista" with "Leopard" and the above paragraphs don't change one bit. It's not Microsoft, it's software. Half the people on this site could probably develop a Stack Overflow clone, with or without looking at the source of this site. They just haven't. The source-code of Firefox and WebKit are out there for anyone to read. Now go write your own browser from scratch. See you in a few years.
Software development is an investment of time. It's utter hubris to imagine that what you're doing is so special that nobody could clone it without looking at your source, or even that it would make their job that much easier without an actionable (and easily detectable) amount of cut and paste.
I deeply disagree with most answers above.
It's true that every software can be stolen despite of obfuscation but, at least, it makes harder to extract and reuse individual parts of the software and that is the point.
Maybe it's cheaper and less risky to use an obfuscation than leaving the code open and fighting at court after somebody stole the best parts of our software and made dangerous concurrency.
Unobfuscated code whispers:
Come on, analyze me, reuse me. Maybe you could make a better software using me.
Obfuscated code says:
Go away dude. It's cheaper to use your own ideas than trying to crack me.
You are going to be fighting a losing battle if you try to obfuscate your code in the hopes of someone not stealing it. You may stop the casual browser from getting at it, but someone dedicated would almost certainly be able to overcome any measure you use.
In the past I have seen people do several things:
Paste a lot of whitespace at the top of the page with a message telling people that the code is unavailable, when in actuality you just need to scroll down a few pages to get at it.
Running it through an encoder of some kind, this is so so useful as it can just be run through the decoder.
Another method is to reduce variable names to one character and remove whitespace (this is also an efficiency thing).
There are many other methods.
In the end, your efforts are only likely to stop the casual browser from seeing your stuff. If someone dedicated comes along then there is not much you will be able to do. You will have to live with this.
My advice would be to make a really awesome product that attracts the most people and beat off any competition by having the best product/service/community and not the most obfuscated code.
You're always faced with the fact that any user that comes to your webpage will download some working version of your Javascript source. They will have the source code. Obfuscating it may make it very difficult to be reused by someone with the intent to steal your hard work. However, in many cases someone can even reuse the obfuscated source! Or in the worst case they can unravel it by hand and eventually comprehend it.
An example of a situation like yours might be Google Maps. The Javascript source is clearly obfuscated. However, for really private/sensitive logic they push the data to the server and have the server process that information using XMLHttpRequests (AJAX). With this design you have the important parts on the server side, much more tightly controlled.
That's probably about the best you can do. Just be aware that anybody with enough dedication, can probably de-obfuscate your program. Just make sure you're comfortable with that before embarking on your project. I think the biggest problem with this would be to control who's using it on their site. If somebody goes to a site with your code on it, and likes what it does, it doesn't matter that they don't understand what the code does, or can't read it, when they can just copy the code, and use it on their own site.
A obfuscator won't help you at all if someone wants to figure out the code. The code still exists on the client machine and they can grab a copy of it and study it at their leisure.
There is simply no way to hide code written in Javascript since the source code has to be handed to the browser for execution.
If you want to hide your code, you have the following options:
1) Use an environment where compiled code (not source) is downloaded to the client, e.g. Flash or Silverlight. I'm not even sure that's foolproof, but it's certainly much better than Javascript.
2) Have a back end on the server side that does the work and a thin client that just makes requests to the server.
I'd say yes, it's enough if you also make sure than you compress the code as well using a tool like Dean Edward's Packer or similar. If you think about what is possible with tools like .NET Reflector in terms of reverse engineering compiled code / IL in .NET, you realize that there's nothing you can do to completely protect your investment.
On the other hand, remember that folks who release their source code also seem to make do quite nicely anyway - it's their experience that people want more than their intellectual property.
code obfuscator is enough for something that needs minimal protection, but I think it will definitely not enough to really protect you. if you are patient you can realy de-mangle the whole thing.. and i'm sure there are programs to do it for you.
That being said, you can't stop anyone from pirating your stuff because they'll eventually will break any kind of protection you create anyway. and it is espcially easy in scripted language where the code is not compiled.
If you are using some other language, maybe java or .NET, You can try doing things like "calling home" to verify that a license number matches a given url. Which works if you your app is some sort of online app that is going to be connected online all the time. But having access to the source, people can easily bypass that part.
In short, javascript is a poor choice for what you are doing.
A step up from what you are doing is maybe using a webservice backend to get your data. Let the webservice handle the authentication/verification process. Requires a bit of work to make sure it is bulletproof, but it might work
If this is for a website, which by its very nature puts viewing of its code one menu click away, is there really any reason to hide anything? If someone wants to steal your code they will most likely go through the effort of making even the most mangled code human readable. Look at commercial websites, they don't obfuscate their code, and no one goes out and steals code from the google apps. If you are really worried about code theft, I would argue for writing it in some other compiled language. (which does of course destroy the whole webapp thing...) Even then, you aren't totally safe, there are many de-compilers out there.
So really, there is no way to do what you want in the face of anyone with sufficient motivation.