Xamarin App Hardening & Shielding

How do you protect a Xamarin app as well as a native app?

For many platforms / languages, code obfuscation and app hardening tools are a familiar way to guard against reverse engineering. For instance, if you’re an Android developer, you may have already used ProGuard to shrink and weakly obfuscate Java code. For much stronger protection, you may have used a tool like DashO to shield, obfuscate and harden your Android Apps.

Xamarin is a great development platform to build Android and iOS apps because it uses C# and around 95 percent or more of the code can be reused. And, it provides almost native user experience.
With Dotfuscator, Xamarin developers have access to that same kind of protection across all major mobile device families, from Android and iOS to Universal Windows (UWP). A light version of Dotfuscator, called the Community Edition even ships by default with every copy of Visual Studio.

Xamarin App Security in Untrusted Environments

Protecting Xamarin mobile applications that run in untrusted environments is important because not everyone who downloads your app has good intentions. Almost certainly, you won’t know that your app and organization is in danger until the damage is done. By starting with a decompiler and a debugger, hackers can reverse engineer just about any app they download from a public app store.

This allows them to steal trade secrets or data, capture communication, compromise code integrity, perform piracy, probe for vulnerabilities, circumvent security checks, etc. This can have very negative consequences to your organization. See the graphic below:
Piracy, theft, and sabotage begin by targeting “weak links” in a revenue chain, so Xamarin apps are becoming a natural target for hackers. But, you can protect Xamarin apps making them more resistant and resilient to reverse engineering, unauthorized debugging, and snooping.

Dotfuscator applies a layered approach to Xamarin App protection using obfuscation, encryption, root detection, shielding and tamper proofing making your apps more difficult for people to exploit. You will get the right mix of active and passive protection to effectively protect your apps. App Hardening is injected directly into your Xamarin application (automatically with every build), so the protection goes wherever your Xamarin mobile app goes.

Watch: Protecting a Xamarin app with Dotfuscator