Zend Guard

You worked hard to develop your code. Now you need to protect it. Zend Guard's powerful encoding and obfuscation technologies prevent reverse engineering, copyright infringement, and unauthorized modification of your code.

Encoding is a process where the PHP source code is converted to an intermediate machine readable format, just like PHP encryption. This format is hard for humans to read and convert back to source code. As a result it protects your code from casual browsing. This means that if people obtain access to your site's code they will not be able to use that for unintended purposes.

Obfuscation is a process where the code is intentionally made very hard to read as source code or as reverse engineered code. This obfuscation is designed to manage risks that stem from unauthorized access to source code. These risks include loss of intellectual property, ease of probing for application vulnerabilities and loss of revenue that can result when applications are reverse engineered, modified to circumvent licensing and then recompiled. Although reverse engineering always existed in computer software, it is especially important for in computing environments such as PHP which take advantage of dynamic processing of language elements rather than code which has been compiled into machine language before being deployed.

Zend Guard's licensing capabilities allow Independent Software Vendors to create a variety of licensing policies for their commercial PHP applications. The product supports most commonly used licensing models such as concurrent users, time limited, segment of network, or server specific licensing. These capabilities allow vendors to maximize their revenue by preventing unauthorized use.