shc - Generic shell script compiler ??

[Justin Conover]

Does anyone see this as being a decent program?  Do you think it
encrypt's the script well enough or is easily crackable?  If it is a
decent program, do you see a need for it in Fedora - extra's or
something as an added security mechanism.  Although I imagine with the
fine grained control of SELinux this probably isn't really need, any
thoughts?

http://www.datsi.fi.upm.es/%7Efrosal/sources/shc.html

http://www.datsi.fi.upm.es/%7Efrosal/sources/CHANGES

http://www.datsi.fi.upm.es/%7Efrosal/sources/shc-3.7.tgz

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/117920/49/

"     shc itself is not a compiler such as cc, it  rather  encodes
     and encrypts a shell script and generates C source code with
     the added expiration capability. It  then  uses  the  system
     compiler  to compile a stripped binary which behaves exactly
     like the  original  script.  Upon  execution,  the  compiled
     binary  will  decrypt and execute the code with the shell -c
     option.  Unfortunatelly, it will  not  give  you  any  speed
     improvement as a real C program would.

     shc's main purpose is to protect  your  shell  scripts  from
     modification  or  inspection.  You can use it if you wish to
     distribute your scripts but don't want  them  to  be  easily
     readable by other people."

[Mike Hearn]

On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 10:57:00 -0600, Justin Conover wrote:
>  Does anyone see this as being a decent program?  Do you think it
>  encrypt's the script well enough or is easily crackable?   
Given that it must pass the script to an external interpreter (unless it
includes a copy of bash) it's trivially crackable and provides no extra
security. If you want to protect valuable shell scripts (????) you'd be
better off with an obfuscator or a generic shell->native code compiler.

thanks -mike