Obfuscating tool for Python3 code

Question

Is there any existing python code obfuscating tool for Python3?

Please do not try to teach me that Python isn't the right choice if I want to hide/obfuscate my code. Or that correct licenses should protect the code instead of obfuscation...

Update: This question does not duplicate issue How do I protect Python code?: I simply ask if there is a tool to obfuscate Python. Nothing more and nothing less. (If there is none I wonder why I get so much feedback...)

Answer 1

No matter what you do, at some point the Python interpreter is going to be reading in unobfuscated Python byte-code. From that it is dead easy to get back to your source code (minus comments and non-obvious layout). This is why everybody says it's pretty much impossible to obfuscate Python. The fact that it's pretty much impossible to obfuscate Python implies that there are no good tools for doing so. I'm afraid it's just wishful thinking to say "I know this can't be done very effectively, but are there any tools for doing it?"

Probably the best you can do will be to encrypt your code with standard encryption tools, and write a little wrapper program in some other language that just decrypts your Python and runs your program, then deletes the unencrypted code when it's done. If you want to put way too much effort in you could probably do something with the C API and embedding the Python interpreter in a C program to feed your unencrypted Python to the interpreter only in memory, rather than files on disk.

Note that these schemes will still be relatively easy to get around, and don't work at all if what you want is to provide importable Python modules (rather than whole programs). Which is why I wouldn't expect to find anyone's already written a tool for you to do it.

Answer 2

I wouldn't go the obfuscating approach if I were you and rather investigate alternative ways to ship executable binary files instead of (byte)-code.

Tools that are known to me (there are probably a few others):

• http://www.ohloh.net/p/py2c (converts Python into C code which you can then compile)
• http://www.pyinstaller.org/
• http://cx-freeze.sourceforge.net/
• http://www.py2exe.org/ (Windows only)
• http://svn.pythonmac.org/py2app/py2app/trunk/doc/index.html (Mac only)

I don't know how hack-proof any of those tools are, but I think it's worth taking a look.

Edit: Damnit, missed the Python 3 part. It's a little hard to help because you don't write anything about the product itself (OS, GUI, etc). If it can be also Python 2 code but you have written all your code in Python 3 already, I suggest 3to2.