ÿTimothy C. May adds:
Hal Finney writes:
The other issue, which I know less about, is the possibility of cryptograph- ically strong obfuscated code. Mike Duvos first mentioned this. You could have an algorithm running on your own computer and have it be impossible to determine what it is doing, or (presumably) to effectively alter the internals of the algorithm. .....stuff detiled..
discussing here (self-decrypting code and such tricks), but rather some mathematically strong transformation has been done on the structure of the code to hide it in a cryptographically strong way.
Brad Cox, of Objective-C notoriety, and now at George Mason University, has also been interested in this area of "complexifying" code so that reverse engineering is difficult or impossible.
Okay if you want to obfuscate your code on a much more secure level albeit with some execution penalty, build public key encryption into the CPU. One would simply compile the program and encrypt it using the public key of the chipset (680xx, 80x86, &c), then the CPU would decrypt and execute the code on the fly using its private key.