Decompiling Java

CHAPTER 3

Tools of the Trade

In the last chapter, you looked at the very heart of a Java classfile. In the next chapter, you’ll perform an in-depth study of all the different ways to protect your code using everything from encryption to obfuscation. After that, you’ll move on to build your own simple decompiler.

In this chapter, you’re going to look at some of the automated tools as well as some simple techniques that hackers could use to modify your code, or worse, to recover your underlying source code. You’ll also take a brief look at all the major obfuscators from third-party vendors, because obfuscation is by far the most popular tool for protecting source code. I’ll be covering the theory behind these obfuscators in the next chapter.