DnGuard Review

Question

I'm thinking about purchasing DnGuard, a .Net Protection tool. Judging the cracking community it seems to be on of the stronger solutions.

Link: DnGuard

Here are my personal pros and cons so far:

cons:

• very expensive (at least for me). The professional version I'm interested in costs $1,299 at the moment.
• Their Site is often slow and sometimes unreachable, which isn't a good sign
• Some technical details like there seems not to be 'real' obfuscation, so at least class names remain visible. This may be good for plugin developement but not for general protection. Maybe I overlooked something.
• I don't know how strong the protection really is because the trial edition functionality is heavily reduced (no HVM, no real encryption). My observations of the cracking community lead to the assumtion that they also use the trial version only. They seem to have developed an unpacker for the trial edition....

pros:

• ... nevertheless do they regard the tool as one of the strongest protectors around. The HVM technology seems to be somewhat unique and could in fact prevent that there ever is dumpable msil code in memory.

Does anybody use it and can recommend it or the opposite?

Thanks

Answer 1

The DnGuard website isn't loading so I can't comment on its features. However, we're using WinLicense from Oreans. A company license is $799 Euros. Single dev license is about $399 Euros. Support is $99 Euros a year for either version.

It supports .NET apps, has a .NET SDK and has a very flexible feature system so you can mix and match methods to lock things down to your preferences.

The site is never down and Oreans has been a reliable vendor for us.

Answer 2

I would ask if you actually need any of this?

There really isn't much point in obfuscating the code (since by it's nature it has to be obfuscation), since anyone really interested in reversing your code can do so.

All they really acheive is to make it a little harder for someone to decompile and use your code. Have you seen this happen in the past? What do you think the risk of this happening is?

Generally your losses due to stolen code are highly likely to be less than your losses due to licence payments.

Answer 3

Hi CJP,

its not so much about code stealing but cracking. It takes me (who has no cracking background) three minutes to defeat a serial protection in an unprotected .net app. So nearly anyone who knows what .net is could do that.

Obfuscation or even better something like DnGuard does strengthens security significantly. First version will be cracked, second version may be cracked (if anybody is interested in the program). That's a big difference in my opinion.