Shell Programming and Scripting

Can anyone decrypt shc encrypted code again ?

Never tried, but it should be possible to replace the interpreter shc is calling (/bin/bash /bin/sh etc) with our own code that simply saved it's input. I wouldn't trust anything in a shc compiled script as secure.

It will be very difficult to get the shell code out of a shc'ed program, since I think it's all turned into assembly. They could disassemble it but it'd be an immense amount of detective work to retrace its steps.

I don't think shc depends on an external shell. There'd be precious little point.

Text strings are another matter. They may be directly extractable via the strings utility.

If you cannot protect the destination file itself, shc is about the best you can manage.

From the manual
Strings will not work because the script is encrypted within the binary, so it's by no means a trivial job to get at the script source, but I would not be putting any credit card numbers, banking details or passwords in there!

Well, dang. That's not even any improvement on the other rube-goldberg machines. No security benefit, no speed benefit, why bother?