Which data protection technique involves twisting the information in such a way that it remains unintelligible, even if the source code is obtained?

Obfuscation is a data protection technique that involves altering the information in such a way that it remains unintelligible to anyone who does not have the means to decipher it. This process makes the data more difficult to understand or interpret, even if someone were to gain access to the source code. The primary goal of obfuscation is to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access or misuse while still allowing it to be processed.

In the context of software development and data security, obfuscation can prevent reverse engineering and make it challenging for an attacker to comprehend the logic of the source code or the data flow, thereby protecting intellectual property and maintaining confidentiality.

While tokenization, anonymization, and encryption are also relevant data protection techniques, each serves a different purpose. Tokenization replaces sensitive data with unique identifiers that can be mapped back to the original data but still maintains some level of usability for certain applications. Anonymization removes personally identifiable information from data sets to protect privacy, while encryption encodes data in such a way that it requires a key for the original information to be accessed. However, these methods do not specifically focus on making the data unintelligible in the way obfuscation does, particularly in the context of protecting code or data structures from being