Firebird Documentation IndexFile and Metadata Security → Other Forms of Obscurity
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Other Forms of Obscurity

Various other forms of security by obscurity have been proposed. Such things as special events that fire on login and log off to call user functions to prevent or deny access. Such features may offer some limited use for closed source systems, where the obscurity of the implementation helps to hide exactly how information is being protected. But for an open source system the work around for such hacks is to simply build your own version of the server that bypasses the event or code which is preventing access. It is difficult to offer obscurity in an open source system.

Consider also what happens when you distribute your compiled executables. Compiled programs are great examples of obscurity. No encryption is used (usually), all steps of the code are there to be analysed by anyone with the time and knowledge and, indeed, there are decompilers available to assist with this process. Once a person discovers what libraries your code was compiled with, isolating the results to only your own “secret” code makes the whole process much faster. Have you written to Borland, Microsoft or whoever requesting that they somehow encrypt their compiled binaries?

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Firebird Documentation IndexFile and Metadata Security → Other Forms of Obscurity