For example, as a post-compilation step you could massage the .class data to make the byte code either harder to read when decompiled or harder to decompile into valid Java code (or both).

Not anymore. Last year, [Michael] wrote Java Grinder, a Java byte-code compiler that compiles classes into assembly language instead of being part of a JVM. This effectively turns Java from a Just ...

The code snippet printed byte counts (123,456,789 bytes) in a human-readable format, like 123.5 MB. Academics found that this code had been copied and embedded in more than 6,000 GitHub Java ...