We are having an application that is downloadable. We want to stop the application being reverse engineered by someone to lose our business. It there any way to stop this?
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220answers:
3
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A:
Hi!
What do you mean by an downloadable application? You are talking about ASP.NET applications in the title of the question, but that's not a kind of application which can be downloaded. If you have a Console/WinForms/WPF-Application that has compiled binaries, you could use code obfuscation tools to make reverse engineering harder.
Best Regards
Oliver Hanappi
2009-07-24 10:50:55
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A:
Visual Studio (usuall) comes with Dotfuscator (community edition). Look in your Visual Studio Tools program files entry.
PreEmptive Solutions’ Dotfuscator is the leading .NET Obfuscator, Compactor and Watermarker that helps protect programs against reverse engineering while making them smaller and more efficient. Dotfuscator Professional Edition is designed to stop even the best of decompilers from producing useful output. It provides comprehensive and efficient .NET code development and deployment.
Dan Diplo
2009-07-24 11:23:22
Disclaimer: I work for this company. Dotfuscator (both the free and Pro versions) does work just fine on ASP.NET assemblies. In addition the Pro version contains more obfuscation technologies that make your applications even harder to reverse engineer. Also, with the Pro version you can make your applications detect and react to anyone tampering with the application binary (such as changing functionality). You can contact PreEmptive Solutions for a free, time limited evaluation of the Pro version to see how it works.
Joe Kuemerle
2009-07-24 14:44:49
A:
I've had a similiar problem. I had a server based piece of software that was loaded onto a server within the customer's premises. This meant anyone half technical could copy the files from the server onto disk and re-install with some know-how onto another server. Basically, stealing my work.
I wrote in numerous measures, I obfuscated the code and I put hooks into all corners of the server (registry, database, root of drive) so if the code was installed elsewhere the system wouldn't find these items and lock itself up. I even went to the lengths of self encrypting some of the source files and then deleting the encryption tool itself. Unfortunately, if anyone wants to steal the software however, they still can. You have to realistically judge how much effort you must put it to stop a percentage of thefts. I love Roeder's Reflector, but it's programmes like this that allow a competent programmer an insight into your protection code and circumvent it.
Have you looked at 3rd party products like Xheo: http://www.xheo.com/products/codeveil/?gclid=CL-Tjoye7psCFdYB4wodHGVZAQ?
I found this on SO too: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/413246/protect-asp-net-source-code
I hope this helps.
Chris Laythorpe
2009-07-24 11:27:46