Can a hacker get access to the name of variables, methods, units, etc. inside a compiled exe Delphi VCL application?
Delphi compiles its source code into raw binary - in constract e.g. to Java or C#/.Net which compiles into some intermediate language, which could be easily un-compiled, and often require obfuscation. Decompilation tools for Delphi are very rough and ineffective - even the most sophisticated ones.
By default, there is no debug information added to the Delphi executable. And Delphi 7 has a limited set of RTTI - it has been enhanced a lot in Delphi 2010. Human readable RTTI information is only about enumerates text, published
properties of classes, interface
inheriting from IInvokable
. So very little information.
So there is almost no way to retrieve the variable names and function names, from a typical Delphi 7 executable. Unless you join the .map
file to the executable (only function names and global variables, not local variables).
Note that this is about the source code - as you asked. For a GUI/VCL application, .dfm content (i.e. the TForm layout) are serialized into the executable, and could be recovered.