Nightmare Obfuscator

Nightmare Obfuscator is a defensive IP-protection tool for controlled collaboration. It creates a working obfuscated copy of a Rust project while the owner keeps the original source. Each output includes a locked metadata vault with checksums, configuration metadata, owner/project metadata, and an integrity signature.

V1 is intentionally narrow:

• Rust source support only.
• One-way obfuscation; the original repo remains the source of truth.
• No runtime key requirement for collaborators.
• No deobfuscation or encrypted original-source recovery promise.
• String encryption is disabled until it can preserve builds reliably.

Install

cargo build --release

Usage

Obfuscate a project into a sibling <name>-obfs directory:

nightmare obfuscate ./my-rust-project

Copy the full project but obfuscate only selected paths:

nightmare obfuscate ./my-rust-project --select src/critical

Choose an explicit output directory and ignore additional paths:

nightmare obfuscate ./my-rust-project \
  --output ./partner-drop \
  --select src/core.rs \
  --ignore snapshots

Verify an obfuscated output:

nightmare verify ./my-rust-project-obfs

Inspect the metadata vault:

nightmare vault ./my-rust-project-obfs

Behavior

By default, Nightmare copies the entire input project so build files, assets, and configuration remain present. If no --select values are provided, all supported Rust source files are obfuscated. If --select is provided, only matching files or directories are obfuscated and unselected files are copied byte-for-byte.

The default ignore set excludes .git, target, dependency/vendor folders, and .nightmare. Additional --ignore <pattern> values are matched against relative paths.

The output metadata lives at:

.nightmare/manifest.json
.nightmare/signature

Development

cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace

Fixture acceptance tests are under fixtures/ and tests/acceptance.rs.

Governance

main is the stable/release branch and dev is the active integration branch. CDLI.ai maintainers own repository governance through CODEOWNERS, security reporting, and review gates.

License

Licensed under either MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.