When companies package binary executables, they are often encrypted, compressed, scrambled, and otherwise made so that your lazy hacker can't simple open the program up in Notepad++ and see the code.

In all the ones I've looked at, however, they each have some critical code components which are unencrypted, uncompressed, and human-readable. Here it seems the methodology is more "security by obfuscation" by creating nonsensical variable names and attempting to make the code as difficult to make sense of possible. But the fact remains that it's there in plain text to be deciphered.

Is this by necessity? I was thinking that it might have to be this way so that the OS has something sensible to execute (which then has instructions to further decompress/unencrypt the rest of the executable), but I don't know enough about it to be sure. Or is there some way to actually scramble an entire executable without having any human-readable components?

When companies package binary executables, they are often encrypted, compressed, scrambled, and otherwise made so that your lazy hacker can't simply open the program up in Notepad++ and see the code.

In all the ones I've looked at, however, they each have some critical code components which are unencrypted, uncompressed, and human-readable. Here it seems the methodology is more "security by obfuscation" by creating nonsensical variable names and attempting to make the code as difficult to make sense of possible. But the fact remains that it's there in plain text to be deciphered.

Is this by necessity? I was thinking that it might have to be this way so that the OS has something sensible to execute (which then has instructions to further decompress/unencrypt the rest of the executable), but I don't know enough about it to be sure. Or is there some way to actually scramble an entire executable without having any human-readable components?