Does your software weight too much? Are you aware of reverse engineering? These are common programmers’ problems, but we can deal with them very easy. All we have to do is use special software for encrypting exe files. There are many, many and once again many commercial software to do that, but should we throw away money if we can use free alternative?
In this post, I’ll show and describe you 3 best exe cryptors/packers - UPX, yoda’s Protector and tElock.

Packer or Cryptor?

It depends on what you need:

• Cryptors - give us many options and good defence against reverse engineering, although files encrypted by some cryptors might be detected by heuristic algorithm of antivirus software…
• Packers - usually have better compression ration then cryptors, but they don’t encrypt exe file and give us very small defence against reverse engineering.

The best packer - UPX

UPX is definitely the best packer with many options and great compression ratio.
What’s more - there are versions for Windows, DOS, i386 Linux, amd64 Linux, PowerPC linux and even for… Atari!
Oh, and one more thing - it is an Open Source project.
It has a very high decompression speed - about 10MB/s on Pentium 133 and 200MB/s on Athlon XP 2000+.

Supported file types:

• arm/pe
• atari/tos
• bvmlinuz/386
• djgpp2/coff
• dos/com
• dos/exe
• dos/sys
• linux/amd64
• linux/ppc32
• mach/ppc32
• ps1/exe
• rtm32/pe
• tmt/adam
• vmlinux/386
• vmlinux386
• watcom/le
• win32/pe

Features:

• Free and Open Source
• Great compression ratio
• Multiplatform
• Instant decompression
• Many file types supported

Screens:

Usage(command line only):
upx.exe --best YouApplication.exe

My opinion:
Great if you aren’t aware of reverse engineering.
It isn’t detected by antivirus software’s heuristic algorithm.

Home: UPX Packer Home Page