Visual Studio 2015 Dotfuscator CE Adoption: The first 500 users

August 10, 2015 10400 Views Sebastian Holst

For the first time since its launch in 2003, Dotfuscator Community Edition (CE), the no cost obfuscator included with Visual Studio, can send anonymous usage data for analysis (only after opt-in of course). …and after one week and 500 users, the resulting application analytics is already proving its worth.

Before I share some of the insights, let me also point out that the instrumentation now inside Dotfuscator CE is the very same as what Dotfuscator CE has been able to inject into .NET apps for Visual Studio users since VS2010. In other words, you can use Dotfuscator CE to achieve these same kinds of results inside your own applications.

Opt-in: of course we collect no information without a user’s informed consent. Happily, 93% of all of our users opted-in (thank you Dotfuscator CE users!). Note, Dotfuscator can inject opt-in policy enforcement too.

Visual Studio SKUs: One important data point we were keen to know was the distribution of our users across the new Visual Studio 2015 SKU’s (Enterprise, Professional and Community Edition). One important historical note: Dotfuscator CE was never included in Visual Studio Express – only the paid SKU’s. For the first time, Dotfuscator CE is now available inside the new (free) Visual Studio CE SKU – and over half of our initial users are coming from this new community. Does this suggest that our total Dotfuscator CE community will double as Visual Studio users migrate to VS 2015? We sure hope so! …and how does this tie back to user registrations? You can bet that we will be tracking this closely.

.NET Runtimes: We can infer quite a bit about the kinds of development our users are focused on by the .NET runtimes their apps target (not the .NET runtime installed with VS2015 which his 4.5 of course). While everyone is excited by the promise of modern development and universal apps, many development organizations’ current projects are still grounded in earlier .NET generations. Clearly, our application protection and analytics will need to support these runtimes for some time to come.

Equipment Manufacturers: In much the same vein, when looking at the underlying devices of these early VS2015 users, we see that they are mostly running on-prem (note, we are looking exclusively at VS2015 Dotfuscator CE users). While everyone is excited about Windows 10 and embracing Azure; early use is still mostly on-prem and, it is for this exact scenario, that our application protection and analytics support on-prem dev environments (and app deployments).

Follow links for:

A comparison of Dotfuscator CE and our other Dotfuscator versions

Stay tuned for more Visual Studio 2015 insights via Dotfuscator CE.

The Secret to Effective In-App Protection

Gartner calls In-App Protection “crucial” in their July 2019 Market Guide for In-App Protection In-App Protection. The guide’s summary advises security and risk management leaders to “take due care in protecting their application clients” in order to avoid “security failure.”

This raises the question – what constitutes “due care?” Obviously, no development organization looks to recklessly expose their applications or sensitive data to attack or compromise. On the other hand, over-engineered (or poorly engineered) security controls can quickly lead to excessive development costs, performance and quality issues, and, ultimately, unacceptable user experiences. While terms and terminology may vary, there is broad consensus on how to best define “due care” for any given application/user scenario.

If you don’t follow application security closely, you might think of application obfuscation and symbol renaming as being synonymous – and with good reason. Many platforms and languages, like .NET, Java, and JavaScript have popular obfuscators that do little else--our own Dotfuscator Community Edition for .NET and ProGuard for Java are good examples. However, obfuscation is far more than symbol renaming – and in-app protection is far more than obfuscation. Much of this expansion has been driven by new security requirements, shifting attack vectors, the rise of mobile and IoT computing and, lastly, the growing recognition inside regulations and legislation of the exposure that can result from inadequately protected software.

PreEmptive has partnered with Microsoft for 16 years and we’ve been involved with .NET since before version 1.0 shipped. From that perspective, it’s hard for us to pinpoint a time where the energy and enthusiasm in the .NET community has been higher than it is now. Over the past few years, Microsoft has put together the annual .NET Conf, completely online with viewers, participants, and local events all over the world. The event is virtual and streamed live over three days.

The big news at this year's .NET Conf was the launch of .NET Core 3, the next step in the continued evolution of .NET. .NET Core 3 is a huge effort, with many moving parts, and Microsoft announced many related releases to support it. Highlights for us included:

Search for lockpicking and you’ll see that there’s no shortage of suppliers ready to serve locksmiths and hobbyists, each community having a perfectly legitimate need. Is there any reason to believe that burglars don’t shop the same sites?

Hackers are developers and they have a long history of enthusiastically embracing and adapting development (and DevOps) innovations to speed their work, extend their reach, and ship software – the only difference is that they’re more likely to use those development tools and platforms on YOUR software rather than on their own. Static code analysis tools, debuggers, and even public bug tracking databases are all go-to hacker resources.

Can you tell the difference? Exception or the norm?

Of course, everyone is “for security” in principle. The hard question that each organization has to answer for themselves is “how much is enough?” Over-engineering is (by definition) excessive, and over-engineering application security can, in fact, be devastating as overly-complex algorithms, architectures and processes can compromise user experience, degrade performance and slow development velocity. On the other hand, punishment is swift for organizations that cut corners and do not effectively secure their applications, their data and, most importantly their users and business stakeholders. Finding and maintaining that balance can be time consuming and, because you can never be sure you’ve gotten it exactly right, it can also be a thankless job.

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