OFF TOPIC: IL DASM the MSIL disassebler

1 Aug 2006 11:09 PM

Manekurt

Hello, I found this tool from the .Net Framework Tools Package, and I opened
one of my .EXE aplications.The disasembler, shows you the code, not in VB,
but important information that I tought it wasnt that easy to see.
Does anyone knows hoy to compile to prevent this disassebler from spying
your code?

Thank you

1 Aug 2006 11:24 PM

Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]

"Manekurt" <mar_c_o_***@gamacom.com.ar> schrieb:
> Hello, I found this tool from the .Net Framework Tools Package, and I
> opened one of my .EXE aplications.The disasembler, shows you the code, not
> in VB, but important information that I tought it wasnt that easy to see.
> Does anyone knows hoy to compile to prevent this disassebler from spying
> your code?

Keyword: obfuscation.

--
M S Herfried K. Wagner
M V P <URL:http://dotnet.mvps.org/>
V B <URL:http://classicvb.org/petition/>

2 Aug 2006 1:10 PM

Jim Wooley

>> Hello, I found this tool from the .Net Framework Tools Package, and I
>> opened one of my .EXE aplications.The disasembler, shows you the
>> code, not in VB, but important information that I tought it wasnt
>> that easy to see. Does anyone knows hoy to compile to prevent this
>> disassebler from spying your code?
>>
> Keyword: obfuscation.

Even with obfuscation, it is still possible to infer the actions inside of
an application. Obfuscation simply replaces the english readable names for
methods/properties/etc with more cryptic versions (ie. Prop1 becomes "a"
and Prop2 could be "aa"). It makes it more difficult to understand what is
going on internally, but not impossible, particularly when using tools like
Reflector. If you truely need to keep business secrets in your code, that
information would need to be kept in server components (ie. web services)
or in unmanaged code.

Jim Wooley
http://devauthority.com/blogs/jwooley