Obsidium vs papaw

Obsidium protects 32-bit and 64-bit Windows software and games against reverse engineering, unauthorized modification, and redistribution while adding licensing controls. It handles native EXE, DLL, and SCR files plus .NET Framework 4.x executables, supporting Windows XP through Windows 11. Selected native code can be converted into bytecode for a virtual CPU. Licensing uses RSA or elliptic-curve cryptography, with expiration dates, hardware locking, and code encryption tied to licenses. Time trials can end on a date, after days or executions, or after specified application actions. Security tools include integrity checks, encrypted data files, anti-disassembly and anti-debugging measures, and license-key blacklisting. An SDK provides examples for C/C++, Delphi, Rust, C#, Visual Basic, PureBasic, and other languages. A key-generation library is available as a Windows DLL and Linux CGI. Network Licensing distributes floating licenses through a local corporate-network service. Obsidium is paid, has no free plan, and offers a free trial.

papaw is a Linux executable packer for programs that include statically linked third-party components, aimed at devices with limited disk space. It compresses executables and bundles them with a decompressor of about 15–40 KB. Supported algorithms are LZMA2, LZMA1, Zstandard and Deflate, and packed executables can replace themselves on disk when run. The project is free and unencumbered software under the MIT license, and can be self-hosted. It uses Meson and can be included as a Meson subproject; the README recommends `custom_target()` for running `papawify`. Prebuilt static binaries are available through GitHub releases, with example assets for aarch64, arm, armeb, i386, mips, mipsel and x86_64. To support portability, the project avoids machine-specific assembly and newer system calls such as `fexecve()`. Optional very basic anti-debugging protection is intended to discourage trivial reverse-engineering techniques. The payload is extracted to a temporary file; when run as root, papaw mounts a tmpfs filesystem and lazily unmounts it before extraction.