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Dotfuscator

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Dotfuscator is a post-development recompilation system for .NET applications developed by PreEmptive Solutions. It analyzes applications and supposedly 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]); changing control flow, and encryption of string literals. Dotfuscator also provides pruning, linking, and watermarking features.

Dotfuscator's method of "overload induction" was patented[2] and is also used in PreEmptive's Java-language obfuscator, DashO.[3]

As with other obfuscators, Dotfuscator makes decompilation difficult, but not impossible.

History

Dotfuscator was developed and first released in 2003 by PreEmptive Solutions.

A free version of Dotfuscator, called the Dotfuscator Community Edition is distributed as part of Microsoft's Visual Studio.[4]

References

  1. ^ Overload-Induction Method Naming, MSDN
  2. ^ US Patent 6102966: "Method for renaming identifiers of a computer program". Paul M. Tyma, PreEmptive Solutions, Inc. Filed March 20, 1998. Issued August 15, 2000. Expired October 7, 2008.
  3. ^ "DashO Java Obfuscator". Reviewed by Tapasya Patki, University of Arizona. September 10, 2008.
  4. ^ Beth Massi (23 February 2010). "Dotfuscator Gets Better and Still Free in Visual Studio". msdn.com. Microsoft, Inc. Retrieved 10 January 2013.
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