.NET Obfuscation to protect your Applications
There are many ways and methods by which one can hide the code that is developed for commercial use. .NET applications have a high cost and are susceptible to attacks by unethical traders in the gray market as stakes run high in hacking these codes. Thus .NET Obfuscators play a vital role in protecting these programs.
Obfuscation literally means to confuse or bewilder. While making a program or software in .NET for commercial usages there are many methods which are used to prevent reverse engineering and unauthorized usage of that particular program. One such method is code obfuscation and the program that comes out of code obfuscation while being used for a .NET application will be called a .NET Obfuscator. While keeping the code’s functionality intact the obfuscation methodology changes the coding in such a way that it becomes quite difficult even with tools to reverse engineer. Remember it becomes difficult not impossible to reverse engineer an obfuscated code. The cost of reverse engineering and duplication of a obfuscated code becomes to much so that hackers are demotivated from doing so.
Code Obfuscation can be classified according to the information they target for obfuscation. There are some that will target the lexical structure of the program and there will be some tat will target the data structures or the control flow. There will be some methods that will target and manipulate the aggregation of control or data and some others will affect the ordering.
Layout Obfuscation focuses on the layout of the application which will cover the source code formatting, variable names and comments. Thus you can easily make your program less susceptible to attacks by having a different source code for people who really want to get your code free of cost. Data obfuscation helps one to obfuscate the data structures in the program which will be quite frustrating for the reverse engineer while reverse engineering he code. Storage variables can be used to obfuscate a code by changing their nature from local to global or vice versa.
Encoding obfuscation can be used to change the way data is interpreted. While working with arrays one has an option of breaking an array into many smaller arrays and storing them on different locations so that while reverse engineering the arrays one doesn’t find all the arrays at one place. Same way data stored in a single array can be stored in a different location which will be time consuming for the hacker to trace but can be made easy for the program to find by specifying the location of the data to the program itself.
There are numerous ways and means to obfuscate a single program the choice can be made by the programmer in terms of the ease with which he is comfortable with. A mix of obfuscation methods can be used so that the reverse engineering process becomes really frustrating and runs high on costs. For more details on Code Protection technology, .net Obfuscator, .net Code Security and .net Code Security feel free to visit our site.
Author writes regularly about Code Protection and .net Obfuscators. To know more about .net Code Security, .net Code Protection and .net obfuscation & .net Obfuscator feel free to contact the author at http://www.secureteam.net/