Which term describes the practice of hiding code to prevent unauthorized reading?

Which term describes the practice of hiding code to prevent unauthorized reading?

• A. Obfuscation
• B. Steganography
• C. Tokenization
• D. Data masking

Answer: (A)

Hiding code to prevent unauthorized reading is obfuscation. The goal of obfuscation is to preserve how the program runs while making the source or bytecode much harder for a human to understand or reverse engineer. Techniques include renaming variables to meaningless tokens, removing or reformatting whitespace, and inserting confusing or non-functional control-flow changes. The key point is that the code remains executable, but its intent and logic are concealed from someone inspecting it. This isn’t steganography, which hides a secret message inside another medium like an image or audio file. It isn’t tokenization, which replaces sensitive data with tokens that stand in for the real data in storage or processing. And it isn’t data masking, which hides or partially reveals data values used in display or testing. Those practices protect data content or privacy, not the readability of the code itself.

Hiding code to prevent unauthorized reading is obfuscation. The goal of obfuscation is to preserve how the program runs while making the source or bytecode much harder for a human to understand or reverse engineer. Techniques include renaming variables to meaningless tokens, removing or reformatting whitespace, and inserting confusing or non-functional control-flow changes. The key point is that the code remains executable, but its intent and logic are concealed from someone inspecting it.

This isn’t steganography, which hides a secret message inside another medium like an image or audio file. It isn’t tokenization, which replaces sensitive data with tokens that stand in for the real data in storage or processing. And it isn’t data masking, which hides or partially reveals data values used in display or testing. Those practices protect data content or privacy, not the readability of the code itself.