Can anyone tell me how to obfuscate a c/cpp program?

Obfuscated code is source code that is (usually intentionally) very hard to read and understand. Some languages are more prone to obfuscation than others. C, C++ and Perl are most often cited as easily obfuscatable languages. Macro preprocessors are often used to create hard to read code by masking the standard language syntax and grammar from the main body of code. The term shrouded code has also been used.





this was one of the definitions found by me for obfuscation

Can anyone tell me how to obfuscate a c/cpp program?
Obfuscated C Contest should give some ideas:


http://www0.us.ioccc.org/years.html





Obfuscation falls into two categories that I'm aware of:


(1) writing very hard to read code for fun or to challenge people


(2) obscuring source so that people cannot easily reverse-engineer it from a distribution.





Type (2) is more important for languages which do not distribute executables and for which very solid decompilers exist (like Java). You can turn any Java .jar back into a pretty close representation of the original source (with JAD). It's not so important for C/C++ because the original source code is nearly impossible to reconstruct from object or executable files.





I'm assuming you're asking about type (1) obfuscation, just for fun, as opposed to commercial obfuscation tools which are type (2).