[Wolf20482]

Greetings,
I was surfing the Internet when I suddenly saw a result like a "ionCube decoder". I'm taken to a legit-looking site which it asks me to register and purchase membership to decode files. It claims that "their decoded files are 99% correct". How does it work when ionCube encodes files into bytecode? If it really works, is it recommended? Please give me some suggestions. Thanks.

[Mashiro]

ionCube encryption / encoding is used by a lot of paid hosting software like WHMCS or cPanel. It's used as DRM. If you want to use a application that uses ionCube as an end user you only need a free ionCube module for PHP or similar.

Free ionCube Loaders:
- https://www.ioncube.com/loaders.php


To be honest things like "ionCube decoders" seem to be highly illegal. They are attemping or are indeed breaking the DRM of ionCube.

[Wolf20482]

ionCube encryption / encoding is used by a lot of paid hosting software like WHMCS or cPanel. It's used as DRM. If you want to use a application that uses ionCube as an end user you only need a free ionCube module for PHP or similar.

Free ionCube Loaders:
- https://www.ioncube.com/loaders.php


To be honest things like "ionCube decoders" seem to be highly illegal. They are attemping or are indeed breaking the DRM of ionCube.

Yeah, I know. Also ionCube encrypts files with bytecode so I'm wondering how ionCube decoders work because ionCube encodes files using bytecode and how can decoders work when it's encoded with bytecode looking like a bunch of spam. 

PS: cPanel uses Perl not PHP but WHMCS do use PHP.

[Littlemaster]

Just don't trust that service. I used to encode my html with ioncube in early days. I think I had much success with it as the encoding was highly secure and people had hard time decoding it. But now things may have changed, even it is possible to get source using javascript loaded browser plugins.
Between this is in the case of html and rest is depending on what you're trying to decode.

[LightDestory]

It depends on how ionCube encoding works, if the convertion is lossy (= there a loss of meaning traveling from high level to low level) the decoded information can't be 99% correct because it is just a "fill missing information" game.
If the encoding process builds a reference table, you can simple read that table to create the correct file.

I think you can compare these processes like "obfuscation and deobfuscation" or reverse engineering, they are not the same but fits a bit the general concept.

So, to sum up: Given a encoded data it is possible to decode it, but it is not sure to get a "usable" thing. Often there is a huge work of understanding and fill missing parts after the decode process.