Which term defines the action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible?

• A. Encryption
• B. Obfuscation
• C. Decryption
• D. Compression

Answer: (B)

Obfuscation is the deliberate act of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible. In technology, this often means transforming code or data so its purpose and logic aren’t easy to understand, even though it still functions. The goal is to deter easy analysis, protect intellectual property, or hide behavior from casual inspection. This matches the description precisely because it centers on obscuring readability rather than changing the data’s usability.

Encryption, by contrast, turns information into ciphertext that can’t be understood without a key, and decryption reverses that to recover the original data. Compression aims to reduce size and, after decompressing, returns to a readable form, not to obscure meaning.