Alan Knowles has posted this post about some of the thinks that came from a previous post he did concerning a tool for encrypting PHP scripts. In this new post, however, he mentions something on the other side of the equation - a "PHP recovery tool".

Someone posted a comment on a post I did a while back about a product that was supposed to provide encryption on PHP scripts. (That blog post was probably my most controversial, as the author of the application send me an email asking me to contact his lawyers....)

The post this time was about another magic cure, php recovery, a new web site claiming (or appearing to) sell a product to recover php source code after it has been encrypted. Well, considering my last post, using plain old PHP methods, this is perfectly feasible. However they also claim to restore your code if it was encrypted with ioncube and Zend's encoders, which, not having tried them, but knowing the author of both products reasonably well, I have a few doubts about.

He mentions what most of the encoders on the market do to accomplish their protection (the translation into bytecodes) and what some of the potential problems with converting the bytecodes back to PHP would be. There's on piece of software he mentions ("Derick's VLD"), but that's only really useful because it dumps back the opcodes in a readable format.