Microsoft dotfuscator

Use it to harden, protect, and prune desktop, mobile, server, and embedded applications to help secure trade secrets and other intellectual property IP , reduce piracy and counterfeiting, and protect against tampering and unauthorized debugging. Dotfuscator works on compiled assemblies without the need for additional programming or even access to source code. It's important to protect your intellectual property IP.

Your application's code contains design and implementation details, which can be considered IP. However, applications built on the. NET Framework contain significant metadata and high-level intermediate code , making them easy to reverse engineer, just by using one of many free, automated tools.

By disrupting and stopping reverse-engineering, you can prevent unauthorized IP disclosure, as well as demonstrate that your code contains trade secrets. Dotfuscator can obfuscate your. NET assemblies to hinder reverse-engineering, while maintaining original application behavior.

It's also important to protect the integrity of your application. In addition to reverse-engineering, bad actors may attempt to pirate your application, alter the application's behavior at run time, or manipulate data. Dotfuscator can inject your application with the capability to detect and respond to unauthorized uses , including tampering, third-party debugging, and rooted devices.

For instructions on how to install the version of Dotfuscator Community included with Visual Studio, see the Installation page. Note: These steps assume you are developing your app with Visual Studio for Windows. First, you need to install Dotfuscator on your development machine. To simplify the integration process, the Dotfuscator team has created an MSBuild targets file, which your Xamarin projects can reference. You can download it here. Save the PreEmptive.

To modify your project file:. For more information on continuing development with obfuscation in place, please see the Continuing Development section in the Dotfuscator User Guide. There may be some cases where an app assumes that the name of a code element at compile time will be the same at runtime. Renaming obfuscation can break this assumption, causing the obfuscated app to behave differently. While newer versions of Dotfuscator are better able to handle these scenarios automatically, some cases may need to be manually configured.

Professional Edition is licensed for use on commercial products, and free trials are available upon request. To see the difference between Community and Professional editions, consider the game example from earlier.

In addition to renaming obfuscation, this code is now also protected by control flow obfuscation. This and other advanced forms of obfuscation are exclusive to Dotfuscator Professional Edition. While I used an Android app as an example, these same steps can also be applied to iOS and UWP projects, so you can protect your app no matter what platforms it runs on. For more details on how to protect Xamarin projects with Dotfuscator, see the Xamarin page of the Dotfuscator User Guide. You can get the latest developments in the obfuscation space by visiting the PreEmptive Solutions blog , and by following PreEmptive on Twitter at twitter.

Hope this helps. Friday, May 5, AM. David, can you please explain where the publish process gets its files from. So it doesn't matter whether a Release build has already been performed, or whether the current configuration is actually Debug.

Is that correct? Monday, May 8, PM. The post I made before this one demonstrates how to use obfuscators with ClickOnce publishing.

Basically, you modify your project file to include MSBuild commands to obfuscate the intermediate output assembly before the hashes are generated.

See above for explicit instructions. I'll get someone who knows the inner workings a bit better to answer the details. Wednesday, May 10, AM.

I'm just trying to do this. Anyone got any more recent information? Friday, February 16, PM. If you can obfuscate those on build, ClickOnce will generate the right manifests. See my above post for details. Here's how I got our project to work with Dotfuscator. I put this all in the post-build event. The actual code is included below. Turn on delay-signing for your assembly Project properties 2. Register the original assembly for verification skipping use sn -Vr 3. Run dotfuscator, using an XML configuration file I added the dotfuscator executable to my path 4.

Make a backup copy of the original optional 5. Unregister the obfuscated assembly for verification skipping use sn -Vu 7. Manually re-sign the assembly with a strong-name key. However, during development and debug builds , I remove this section of code and turn delay signing back off. Monday, February 19, PM. I have an exe and 11 dll's written in.

NET 3. It seems that WPF cannot be obfuscated! When does Clickonce create the manifest, calculate the hash, etc.? Thanks John. Monday, February 26, PM.