正如很多人已经说过的:在一个普通的CPU上，你不能阻止它们，你只能延迟它们。就像我以前的密码学老师告诉我的那样:你不需要完美的加密，破解密码的代价肯定比获得的代价更大。你的困惑也是一样。

但还有3个注意事项:

It is possible to make reverse engineering impossible, BUT (and this is a very very big but), you cant do it on a conventional cpu. I did also much hardware development, and often FPGA are used. E.g. the Virtex 5 FX have a PowerPC CPU on them, and you can use the APU to implement own CPU opcodes in your hardware. You could use this facility to really decrypt incstuctions for the PowerPC, that is not accessible by the outside or other software, or even execute the command in the hardware. As the FPGA has builtin AES encryption for its configuration bitstream, you could not reverse engineer it (except someone manages to break AES, but then I guess we have other problems...). This ways vendors of hardware IP also protect their work. You speak from protocol. You dont say what kind of protocol it is, but when it is a network protocol you should at least protect it against network sniffing. This can you indeed do by encryption. But if you want to protect the en/decryption from an owner of the software, you are back to the obfuscation. Do make your programm undebuggable/unrunnable. Try to use some kind of detection of debugging and apply it e.g. in some formula oder adding a debug register content to a magic constant. It is much harder if your program looks in debug mode is if it where running normal, but makes a complete wrong computation, operation, or some other. E.g. I know some eco games, that had a really nasty copy-protection (I know you dont want copyprotection, but it is similar): The stolen version altered the mined resources after 30 mins of game play, and suddenly you got just a single resource. The pirate just cracked it (i.e. reverse engineered it) - checked if it run, and volia released it. Such slight behaviour changings are very hard to detect, esp. if they do not appear instantly to detection, but only delayed.

所以最后我想建议: 估算逆向工程人员的收益，将其转化为一些时间(例如，使用最便宜的印度工资)，并进行逆向工程，使时间成本更大。

有一件事到目前为止还没有被提及:

您可以在自己的端(服务器端，例如由REST API调用)运行部分代码。这样，逆向工程师就完全无法访问代码。

当然，这只适用于

延迟 交通量 计算和I/O功率 隐私问题

不会阻止服务器端执行(部分)您的代码。

但只要有合适的时间框架，代码分析人员都可以解决这些问题。

如果你给人们一个他们能够运行的程序，那么只要有足够的时间，他们也能够对它进行逆向工程。这就是程序的本质。一旦二进制文件可供想要破译它的人使用，您就无法阻止最终的逆向工程。毕竟，计算机必须能够破译它才能运行它，而人类只是一台较慢的计算机。

最近有一篇论文叫做“程序混淆和一次性程序”。如果你真的想保护你的应用程序。本文主要围绕使用简单通用硬件的理论不可能结果。

如果你负担不起额外的硬件，那么还有另一篇论文，在所有具有相同功能和相同大小的程序中，给出了理论上的最佳可能混淆“On最佳可能混淆”。然而，本文表明，信息理论的最佳可能意味着多项式层次结构的崩溃。

如果这些结果不能满足你的需要，这些论文至少应该给你足够的参考书目引导去查阅相关文献。

更新:一种新的混淆概念，称为不可区分混淆，可以减轻不可能性结果(论文)

安全网哨兵(原阿拉丁)。不过要注意的是——他们的API很烂，文档也很烂，但与他们的SDK工具相比，这两者都很棒。

I've used their hardware protection method (Sentinel HASP HL) for many years. It requires a proprietary USB key fob which acts as the 'license' for the software. Their SDK encrypts and obfuscates your executable & libraries, and allows you to tie different features in your application to features burned into the key. Without a USB key provided and activated by the licensor, the software can not decrypt and hence will not run. The Key even uses a customized USB communication protocol (outside my realm of knowledge, I'm not a device driver guy) to make it difficult to build a virtual key, or tamper with the communication between the runtime wrapper and key. Their SDK is not very developer friendly, and is quite painful to integrate adding protection with an automated build process (but possible).

Before we implemented the HASP HL protection, there were 7 known pirates who had stripped the dotfuscator 'protections' from the product. We added the HASP protection at the same time as a major update to the software, which performs some heavy calculation on video in real time. As best I can tell from profiling and benchmarking, the HASP HL protection only slowed the intensive calculations by about 3%. Since that software was released about 5 years ago, not one new pirate of the product has been found. The software which it protects is in high demand in it's market segment, and the client is aware of several competitors actively trying to reverse engineer (without success so far). We know they have tried to solicit help from a few groups in Russia which advertise a service to break software protection, as numerous posts on various newsgroups and forums have included the newer versions of the protected product.

最近，我们在一个较小的项目上尝试了他们的软件许可解决方案(HASP SL)，如果您已经熟悉HL产品，那么这个解决方案就足够简单了。它似乎有效;目前还没有关于盗版事件的报道，但这款产品的需求要低得多。

当然，没有什么保护措施是完美的。如果有人有足够的动机，并且有大量的现金可以烧，我相信HASP提供的保护是可以规避的。

自2013年7月以来，人们对密码学上健壮的混淆(以不可区分混淆的形式)重新产生了兴趣，这似乎是由Amit Sahai的原始研究激发的。

Sahai, Garg, Gentry, Halevi, Raykova, Waters，候选人 以及所有电路的功能加密(2013年7月21日)。 Sahai, Waters，《如何使用无区别模糊处理》 可否认加密，以及更多。 Sahai, Barak, Garg, Kalai, Paneth，保护混淆不受代数攻击(2014年2月4日)。

您可以在这篇Quanta Magazine文章和IEEE Spectrum文章中找到一些提炼的信息。

目前，利用这项技术所需的资源数量使其不切实际，但AFAICT的共识是对未来相当乐观。

我这么说很随意，但对于那些习惯于本能地忽视混淆技术的人来说——这是不同的。如果它被证明是真正的工作和实际，这确实是重要的，而不仅仅是为了混淆视听。