The most widely used .NET obfuscator – and now, much more

This morning, as we readied our latest Dotfuscator Community Edition (CE) announcement, it struck me that this remarkable piece of software has a unique story to tell. A story that can’t be expressed in a feature table or change log.

Sensitive business data is more vulnerable now than ever before. As a result, organizations are being pushed to protect/encrypt their data from its initial creation to its final destruction.

Released on September 31, 2016, Dotfuscator Professional 4.25 includes, for the first time, the ability to inject real-time detection, defense, and notification of unauthorized debugger use against production applications.

In the first "peek" into our soon to be published application risk management survey results, we shared that 58% of the respondents reported making ongoing development investments specifically to manage “application risk.” See Managing Application Vulnerabilities (an early peek into improved controls for your code and data)

I’m working on an application risk management study/survey focusing on the importance of one vulnerability exploit in particular: debugger hacks against production apps. Our initial data set already includes responses from 100+ developers targeting cloud, mobile and desktop platforms from 15+ countries.

Today we released Dotfuscator v4.25 that includes, for the first time, anti-debug defense and alert capabilities. Dotfuscator Professional users can now configure Dotfuscator to inject logic to defend against the unauthorized use of a debugger in production. We’ve already previewed this capability in our Java/Android product, DashO, and this latest anti-debug feature sits alongside our other “detective controls” including anti-tamper and shelf-life.

Note: this document is deprecated. Please see Obfuscating Xamarin Applications with Dotfuscator for up to date instructions on obfuscating Xamarin applications.

We've previously blogged about Using Dotfuscator Professional with Xamarin Applications. We've also blogged about the recently added command line support for Dotfuscator Community Edition. Now it is time to put these two concepts together, and show how to make reverse-engineering your Xamarin application more difficult by integrating Dotfuscator Community Edition (CE) into your Visual Studio build process.

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.