How can I protect java/javafx code from being seen by final user?

I would like your help because after hours of searching I didn’t come up to a conclusion. I have been working on a project alone for more than two years for a company. The project is a really big one using rxtx to communicate with a hardware device. I used Java 8 and JAVAFX for the UI. Now it is almost finished and I am starting to search how to deliver the end user application that the company will distribute over its clients.

The problem is that the company I am working with wants the code to be non reachable when the software is between final clients hands because the java code contains some extremely sensitive information that could have very bad consequences for the company if final clients happened to know them. The clients can literally perform actions they don’t have the right to perform.

So after searching (a lot) and thinking relatively to my case, I understood that giving a JAR obfuscated isn’t the solution. I then tried to generate a JAR and then transform it to an EXE but all I succeeded on was wrapping the JAR into EXE which does not prevent extracting the JAR and then seeing all the code easily. Finally, I found that I should use AoT compilation like GCJ compiler to produce native binary exe from my java code but here I am stuck because after watching videos and reading articles etc I didn’t manage to find a clear way to produce the native binary exe.

I am now confused since I don’t know if I am on the right path and good direction or if I am totally wrong and there is another way of protecting the code (at least from non professional hackers, I understand that it is not possible to make it 100% safe but I am just searching for a reasonable and good way). So please could you help and guide me to know how I should manage this final step of my work?

#java #security