Re: [IMPORTANT] obfuscators

From: Richard Blewett [DevelopMentor] (richardb_at_NOSPAMdevelop.com)
Date: 11/10/04 

To: microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 16:35:38 -0800

There is only one way to stop someone reverse engineering your binary - don't give them the binary, only provide remote access. Once you have given them your binary then you are in a battle as to the cost in reverse engineering compared with the benefit they will get from reverse engineering.

 For example, reverse engineering an industrial strength cryptography algorithm gives ytooiu nothing as the algorithm is public knowledge (in general) and the cryptography, just by its nature is hard to crack. Reverse engineering MS Word would not give you a huge amout of information about howq Word works as its complexity lives at the macro level not within each method. So many application just provide no benefit from reverse engineering.

 If you must supply the binary and it does have IP in teh code (like a new video CODEC) then you have two options: obfuscation or building the sensitive operation in non-managed code and using interop. The latter takes the reverse engineering difficulty to the same level as the world before .NET.

 Regards

 Richard Blewett - DevelopMentor
 http://www.dotnetconsult.co.uk/weblog
 http://www.dotnetconsult.co.uk

   nntp://news.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp/>

 Gentlemen,
 
 I realized that code security can easily be corrupted by cheap decompilers.
 What does Microsoft suggest using to disable or at the least make it
 impossible for the intruder to reverse engineer DLLs or EXEs.
 
 Thanks,
 
 Yama Kamyar

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