The true value of trade secrets – as with any class of intellectual property – is directly proportional to the owner’s ability to enforce their rights through criminal and civil actions.

Today more than ever, applications are mobile and can be run worldwide. And many useful apps access sensitive data and have value-added functionality within them (such as trade secrets). Because traditional firewall type attacks are much more difficult today, hackers are increasingly targeting both consumer and enterprise mobile and desktop apps as a newer attack vector. So, those apps may be at risk from theft of IP/underlying sensitive data, malware injection and more advanced targeted threats.

Harden applications against hostile and compromised environments – not just simple attacks.

Once a mobile device or an on-premises server or a PC… is known to be compromised or in hostile hands (detected, for example, when someone attaches a debugger to an app in what is a strictly production setting), doesn’t it make sense to be able to alter your app’s runtime behavior in real time? …and not just at the time of discovery – but also into the future – and for as long as the runtime environment remains suspect?

Pokefan Alert - augmented reality apps like Pokemon Go are rooted in the REAL WORLD (not a virtual one) – a real world with a host of very real dangers.

Pokemon Go players are walking into traffic, being lured into remote locations to be robbed, and last (but in no way least) they’re being duped into using counterfeit (tampered) Pokemon Go apps.

Video of Obama signing the DTSA

Code obfuscation and the doctrine of “contributory negligence”

On May 11, 2016, President Obama signed the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016.

Enjoying unprecedented bipartisan support (Senate 87-0 and the House 410-2), this bill expands trade secret protection across the US and substantially increases penalties for criminal misconduct – and what could go wrong with that?

At Microsoft Build 2016, we introduced a new feature for Dotfuscator Community Edition (CE): command line support. This will allow you to integrate Dotfuscator into your automated build process, so that your builds and releases can automatically use Dotfuscator for obfuscation, tamper protection, usage tracking, and expiration. To help you get started, this post will walk through how to use the command line interface (CLI), as well as how to integrate it into MSBuild and Visual Studio for automated builds.

As of Dotfuscator Professional 4.37 these instructions are deprecated. Dotfuscator now supports a much faster, easier, and more reliable way to protect UWP apps.

As of its 4.20 release, Dotfuscator Professional supports protecting Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications.

There are two recommended ways to incorporate Dotfuscator into your UWP application build process: (1) integrate Dotfuscator into the MSBuild pipeline or (2) use Dotfuscator directly on your appx packages. These methods differ in their ease-of-use and in the level of protection they provide.

Note There is an issue with Method 1 when working with solutions that include a library project. We recommend using Method 2 for all projects. Please contact support if you have issues or questions.