asp.net .dll code protection

[guoqi zheng]

I often write some .dll component for other people. Because of CLR, I often
find easily access to all source code of my .DLL file by using some kind of
reflector.

Is there an easy to protect my .NET .DLL class source code?

regards,

Guoqi Zheng
http://www.ureader.com

 

[Guest]

'Guoqi,
There must be at least a dozen obfuscator products in the marketplace now.
One of them, "Dotfuscator" ( I think its a "Community Edition") ships with
Visual Studio.Net, so you should already have it.

I'd suggest starting with that.
Peter

 

[Guest]

There are two things you can do - one is to obfuscate it and hence make the
reversed .NET code almost unreadable.

The other is to use ngen.exe and compile the assembly to native code - in
which case it is converted to binary. The drawback is that ngen targets the
native code to the processor architecture that you are running it on - so you
might lose out on processor-specific enhancements of .NET JIT compiler and
also the code wouldn't work on a different processor architecture (such as
64-bit).

Regards
Pandurang

 

[Huihong]

NGen is no good in code protection, as it still requires the original
(unprotected) assemlies to be present. Our salamander suite offers a
series of products, including obfuscator, protector and native compiler
for code protection and deployment without installing the .NET
Framework.

Huihong
http://www.remotesoft.com

 

[Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]]

You can use the obfuscator that's built into ASP.NET 1.x and above, or you
could use one of these 3rd party obfuscators which generally claim to be
better:
http://www.lesser-software.com/ilobf.htm
http://www.junglecreatures.com/DesktopDefault.aspx
http://www.9rays.net/cgi-bin/components.cgi?act=1&cid=86
http://www.remotesoft.com/salamander/obfuscator.html
http://www.semdesigns.com/products/obfuscators/csharpobfuscator.html
http://www.wiseowl.com/products/products.aspx
http://www.abderaware.com/WhitePapers/Obfuscator.htm

 

[Jon Paal]

free for use

http://www.aspose.com/Products/Aspose.Obfuscator/

 

[LogicNP]

You can pre-compile all your code to a dll and then obfuscate the resulting dll. Use Crypto Obfuscator for the obfuscation.