How can I Encrypt/Obfuscate/Hide my code?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Anil Gupte/iCinema.com
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A

Anil Gupte/iCinema.com

Apparently there are plenty of utilities out there that can dissasemble my
progam. My colleague found a progam that could read my exe file and show
all my source code! In any language (even though I wrote it in VB). It is
kinda scary. Interestingly, I had a DLL written for me in VC++, and the
utility could not reverse engineer that.

Is there any way that the code can encryptedd or ofuscated or hidden so
people cannot read the source? I thought there was something built into VS,
but I cannot find it.

Thanx,
 
Apparently there are plenty of utilities out there that can dissasemble my
progam.  My colleague found a progam that could read my exe file and show
all my source code! In any language (even though I wrote it in VB).  Itis
kinda scary.  Interestingly, I had a DLL written for me in VC++, and the
utility could not reverse engineer that.

Is there any way that the code can encryptedd or ofuscated or hidden so
people cannot read the source?  I thought there was something built into VS,
but I cannot find it.

Thanx,
Click to expand...

Dotfuscator is the built in (sorta) tool you're thinking of, it's
usually under the Tools menu.

But the question you really need to ask is whether or not its a big
deal that people can get a hold of your source code. Even with
obfuscators, your program can still be disassembled with programs such
as Reflector, it'll just be harder to read.

I tend to take the approach Microsoft did with .NET, I leave my code
completely open. You can hit my applications with Reflector just as
easily as you can the core frameworks in .NET. Why? Because nothing I
wrote is so advanced that no one else should know how I created it,
and for the fact that you shouldn't be relying on security
implementations that can be removed if the code was public (security
through obscurity is bad). Of course the fact that I now write code
almost exclusively for web sites means that I don't have much (if any)
of an audience for Reflector users, but I still feel you should try to
obscure your code.

Thanks,

Seth Rowe [MVP]
http://sethrowe.blogspot.com/
 
Apparently there are plenty of utilities out there that can dissasemble my
progam. My colleague found a progam that could read my exe file and show
all my source code! In any language (even though I wrote it in VB). It is
kinda scary. Interestingly, I had a DLL written for me in VC++, and the
utility could not reverse engineer that.

Is there any way that the code can encryptedd or ofuscated or hidden so
people cannot read the source? I thought there was something built into VS,
but I cannot find it.

Thanx,
Click to expand...

There may be much techniques, plus this article may arouse an
interest:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164058.aspx

Thanks,

Onur Güzel
 
Anil Gupte/iCinema.com said:
Apparently there are plenty of utilities out there that can dissasemble my
progam. My colleague found a progam that could read my exe file and show
all my source code! In any language (even though I wrote it in VB). It is
kinda scary. Interestingly, I had a DLL written for me in VC++, and the
utility could not reverse engineer that.

Is there any way that the code can encryptedd or ofuscated or hidden so
people cannot read the source? I thought there was something built into
VS, but I cannot find it.
Click to expand...

There are three solutions:

* Obfuscation
* Encryption
* Services

Microsoft's solution:

SLP Services Home
<URL:http://www.microsoft.com/slps/Default.aspx>

You can use obfuscation (VS comes with a cut down version of a commecial
obfuscator) to make reverse engineering harder.

However, this is not a perfect solution. The only 100 % solution is to
place the code on a server you own and expose the functionality via a
service (Web service).
 
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