The best way to obfuscate or protect .Net assemblies

Question

I am looking for a technique or tool that we can use to confuse or somehow protect our compiled C # code. The goal is not to protect users and data, but to prevent the reconstruction of some technologies in our software.

This is not for use on the Internet, but for a desktop application.

Do you know about any tools available for this type? (They should not be free)

What kind of consequences can consequences, if any?

Are there any negative side effects when using the debugger during development?

We log traces of problem stacks in the field. How will obfuscation affect this?

Answer 1

This is a pretty good list of obfuscators from msdn. Obfuscators

• Smartassembly
• Dotfuscator .NET Obfuscator
• Salamander .NET Obfuscator
• Semantic Projects : C # Obfuscator Source Code
• Spices.Net
• Thinstall
• Demeanor for .NET.
• Xenocode Postbuild 2006
• .NET Reactor
• Crypto obfuscator
• DeployLX CodeVeil

I did not observe any performance issues while messing up my code. If you just send text traces of the stack, you might have a problem translating method names.

Answer 2

http://xheo.com/products/code-protection

I had a job in the past.

Answer 3

There are tools that also "deobfuse" the confusing DLLs - I would suggest including the part that should be protected in an unmanaged component.

Answer 4

You are wasting your time on this path. If you have a code that you do not want anyone to see, you need to keep it behind closed doors. For example, run this code only on your server using the web service interface.

Obfuscating your code only holds back the most random people. As the video game industry has long since receded, no code can be cracked.