16.4 Preventing Reverse-Engineering of Your Code with Dotfuscator

Your code is a valuable asset that you’ll want to protect if competitive advantage, trade secrets, and intellectual property (IP) rights mean anything to you. Unless you take steps to prevent them, disassemblers can quickly reverse-engineer your compiled binaries back to source code, meaning your code can be compromised. Fortunately, Microsoft recognizes this problem and bundles a free (though basic) tool with Visual Studio to introduce you to the solution to this issue. That tool is Dotfuscator Community Edition, from PreEmptive Solutions.

Dotfuscator Community Edition at a Glance

Tool

Dotfuscator Community Edition

Version covered

3.0.2005.16132

Home page

http://www.preemptive.com/products/dotfuscator/index.html

Power Tools page

http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/94

Summary

Performs basic obfuscation on .NET assemblies

License type

Freeware

Online resources

FAQs, knowledge base

Supported Frameworks

.NET 1.1, 2.0

Related tools in this book

ILDASM, Reflector

Getting Started

Dotfuscator Community Edition is included with Visual Studio 2003 and 2005. Upgrades offering numerous additional features are available; see the web site for details.

Using Dotfuscator

Your compiled .NET assemblies aren’t really compiled, in the traditional sense, to machine language. Instead, they persist in Microsoft Intermediate Language until the JIT compiler compiles ...

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