What is the term for convoluting code to the point it is not easily decipherable even if obtained?

The correct term for making code difficult to understand, even if it is obtained, is obfuscation. Obfuscation involves deliberately altering the code to make it less readable and more complex while maintaining its functionality. This technique is used primarily as a security measure to protect intellectual property and to deter reverse engineering by making the code hard to decipher.

Obfuscation can employ various strategies such as renaming variables to meaningless terms, altering control flow, inserting misleading code, or using complex expressions. The objective is to increase the difficulty for anyone trying to understand or exploit the code.

In contrast, encryption transforms data into a format that is unreadable without a decryption key, focusing on data confidentiality rather than simply obscuring code. Compression reduces the size of data for storage or transmission but does not affect its readability. Hashing generates a fixed-size representation of data primarily for verifying integrity but does not conceal the original code in a decipherable format. Thus, obfuscation is specifically tailored to make code less understandable.