Dotfuscator

Dotfuscator is post-development recompilation software for .NET applications developed by PreEmptive Solutions. It analyzes applications and makes them smaller, faster and harder to reverse-engineer. The obfuscation techniques used by Dotfuscator include renaming (replacing meaningful identifiers with short meaningless names), "overload induction" (renaming many methods to the same name, relying on overload resolution to choose the right meaning^[1]); complicating control flow, and string literal scrambling. Dotfuscator also provides dead code elimination and watermarking features.

As with other obfuscators, Dotfuscator makes life more difficult for decompilers, but it does not claim to provide adequate protection.

History

Dotfuscator was released in 2003 by PreEmptive Solutions in response to Microsoft's need for obfuscation of users' .NET framework MSIL assemblies.

Since 2003, the Community Edition has been included with Microsoft Visual Studio.^[2]^{[unreliable source?]}

In 2012, the Community Edition was expanded to offer exception handling accounting,^[3] first in Team Foundation Server 2012.

References

^ Overload-Induction Method Naming, MSDN
^ Beth Massi (23 February 2010). "Dotfuscator Gets Better and Still Free in Visual Studio". msdn.com. Microsoft, Inc. Retrieved 10 January 2013.
^ "PreEmptive Solutions and Microsoft Partner to Provide Exception Analytics in Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012". Microsoft.com. Microsoft, Inc. 13 September 2012. Retrieved 24 January 2013.

External links

[1] Overload-Induction Method Naming, MSDN

[CB1-2] Beth Massi (23 February 2010). "Dotfuscator Gets Better and Still Free in Visual Studio". msdn.com. Microsoft, Inc. Retrieved 10 January 2013.

[CB2-3] "PreEmptive Solutions and Microsoft Partner to Provide Exception Analytics in Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012". Microsoft.com. Microsoft, Inc. 13 September 2012. Retrieved 24 January 2013.

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