Comment by diavelguru

We shipped software in the late 90’s with a hasp protection key required for use to prevent copying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_protection_dongle part of the process was to run a hasp obfuscation exe against our newly compiled exe. It was most likely an encryption algorithm that had the key on the hardware dongle. This exe is what was put in the resulting floppy disks and burned onto cd’s for distribution. I fielded many calls regarding issues with this but it worked and kept the software limited (it was a niche market). I can see something like this foiling any LLM inspection of the resulting binary as the binary has been drastically modified from its original. What’s old is new again.