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Why Obfuscate?
Obfuscation prevents .NET assembly source code recompilation without changing its functionality. Obfuscation deals by hooding the main points of your .NET code.
We know only one reason why you have to obfuscate your .NET app. To attach importance to their stuff other vendors of Obfuscation tools adduce the following instances as reasons why we should obfuscate:
1. Obfuscation reduces the size of an executable
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Ask you self. Do you really need to reduce size of your .NET app? Why? Try to measure how fast will work your .NET exe after its size twice reduction/increasing.
You will have the same experimental values.
2. Obfuscation improves the applications performance at run time
Does this sentence mean that your .NET app was working just a little bit 'not good' before the obfuscation? What the impact for your end-users?
3. Obfuscation protects intellectual property
This is the only reason.
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I first purchased Skater Pro in 2008 for a commercial application I needed
to secure, and it did the job. Since then I have upgraded my development
environment up to VS 2010 on Windows 7, so I decided to purchase an upgrade
of Skater to get the current version. Wouldn't you know, I had a problem
with very first assembly that I tried to obfuscate. However, I emailed the
problem assembly to them and the RustemSoft team came through with a
corrected Skater the same day. That's great customer support!
Stephen Rosenbaum
Independent Software Developer
Weston, Florida, US
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Just over a year ago we discovered that someone had created a keygen for our Archive Manager software. 2 years of work could have gone up the spout, and the dangers of developing software on the .Net platform (e.g how easy assemblies are to reverse engineer) became very clear.
We looked around at all the different products that were on the market and they were all either far too expensive or really complicated. We just wanted something that we could point at our final compiled versions of our assemblies, hit 'go', and then distribute the protected article.
Skater.Net fitted the bill perfectly, and was the best value for money solution that we found (and we looked at a lot of those on offer!).
So, I would like to thank you for producing what is a great bit of software.
A change of licence keys a year ago, and an extra couple of minutes to scramble the final assemblies before we distribute a new version and the problem of key gens and such has completely gone away.
Good Job :-)
Mark Laverty
President
MLtek, England
mltek.co.uk
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Thank you for the Skater! I'm using the Skater to obfuscate a suite of applications used by a NASCAR Cup Team. It's a competitive environment full of people who really want to know how everything works! I go back and confirm each obfuscation with Lutz Roeder's .Net Reflector, and I really like what I can't see :-)
Michael Bearden , Head of software and engineering services
Apex Educational Technologies, Inc.
Shreveport, LA, USA
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Skater has been a very reliable and easy to use program. It has all of the features I need without the problems of other obfuscators. I've tried others but after obfuscating, my program immediately crashes. Even with minimal obfuscation settings. Trying to get in touch with the the creators of these programs takes days or longer. In between that time, I found Skater and never looked back. Skater has always been able to obfuscate my software with all settings turned on. RustemSoft stands behind their product as well - giving very good immediate responses, which is rare in general. It's a pleasure doing business with them.
Brett Romero
President
www.cygen.com
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It works great! I love the Visual Studio 2005 integration. I have a lot of constants and strings in my projects. I obfuscated them all then tried to view them using Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector version 4.2.51.0 and I could not read them at all. It works great and for the price it's a no brainer to use this great product.
This product is more efficient than Microsoft's refactoring power toy, and is very easy to use!
Ryan J. Birnesser
Systems Software Designer/Programmer, Pioneer Pole Buildings, Inc.
Schuylkill Haven, PA
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RustemSoft proposes Skater .NET Obfuscator, an obfuscation tool for .NET code protection. It implements all known software protection techniques and obfuscation algorithms.
If you would like periodically obfuscate your .NET products the Skater .NET Obfuscator is for you. RustemSoft is using the Skater for internal needs securing all RustemSoft .NET executables and assemblies. Its command-line version running in batch mode is much useful for your scheduled products updates. You have to assign settings for an assembly in GUI version first. Then the batch obfuscate task will use the settings.
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 Application vulnerabilities, Intellectual Property theft and revenue loss are among the most serious risks facing companies today. According to Business Software Alliance statistics, four out of every ten software programs is pirated in software business, world wide.
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Unauthorized access to source code can offer a quick back entrance into your systems, business processes and revenue streams. Global piracy rate has increased 40% over the past years and nearly $11 billion is lost. This is definitely a clear threat for software producers and thus to global economy. With more than half of million developers with some level of access to .NET reengineering tools providing near instant access to source from any .NET binary, organizations across industries are entrusting on obfuscation to managing these risks. Over the years, several software protection techniques have been developed, code obfuscation is one of them and it is very promising.
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Code obfuscation is a form of software protection against unauthorized reverse-engineering.
The chief functions of any software protection technique can be determined as detection of pirate attempts to decipher or tamper software, protection against such attempts and alteration of software to ensure that it functionality degrades in an undetectable manner if the protection fails.
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Cardinal obfuscation techniques:
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Private and Public members names obfuscation.
It scrambles names of classes, methods, variables, and other assembly members. It makes assembly code reverse engineering much harder by obfuscating names. Some Skater settings allow to generated names that will prevent recompilation.
Public members in dll libraries are advisedly reserved from obfuscation because they are intended to be used in external assembly code. If you are sure some of public members are not to be accessed from outside, you may want to obfuscate them.
For exe executables you may consider the assemblies to be self-contained, and set obfuscation of all possible names very aggressively, including Public Members.
String encryption.
The string encryption function allows you to select literal values of string data type to be encrypted. You may select all strings to be encrypted. Also you may mark some specific strings to obfuscate. You have choice to apply a cryptography method for the string encryption. Only specified strings will be encrypted /obfuscated.
Since Strings can provide useful clues for anyone trying to reverse-engineer your code it makes sense to protect your string data from spying eyes. It will not prevent an absolute hacker from deciphering the conversion and seeing your data. However, for example, an attacker trying to break a licensing routine would first focus attention on Strings having to do with licensing to locate the appropriate spot of code. Skater can make this more difficult by encrypting the strings in your .NET assembly. This is done by inserting a decryption routine into the assembly and calling the decryption code at runtime to return the original Strings.
Control Flow obfuscation intended to stop decompilers and deobfuscators from functioning correctly.
Control Flow obfuscation subdues reverse engineering by scrambling .NET methods (functions and procedures) code. The Control Flow obfuscation algorithm distorts and reorders the IL code in the assembly, inserting bait branch instructions while preserving code semantics. This obfuscating essentially converts assembly method implementations into "spaghetti code", making interpretation by human hackers and decompiler tools much more difficult.
Actually Control Flow obfuscation involves the insertion of additional instructions. Applying of this feature increases the size of the output assembly. If a maximum level of code protection is not required for your assembly, you may want to consider disabling this feature to minimize your output executable code size.
Control Flow obfuscation discourages reverse engineering and malicious tampering of software codes by applying false conditional statements and other misleading constructs in order to confuse and break decompilers. Given the original source codes and desired obfuscation criteria, the proposed Control Flow obfuscation works by decomposing the source codes into fragments and then applying various transforms to the code fragments. As the Skaters output, the transformed fragments are re-assembled and obfuscated with the designated obfuscation criteria. Moreover, since only Control Flows are obfuscated with a sequence of transformations that produce equivalent results of the original fragments, the final output can still preserve the same execution results as the original codes.
 You need to obfuscate your .NET code because IL (.NET Intermediate Language) code contains all of the information, apart from comments, that is in .NET executable (*.exe or *.dll) files. Using a decompiler a belligerent competitor can easily reverse engineer your .NET apps. To resist this threat, it is possible to obfuscate your assemblies before distributing your software.
The obfuscation process bereaves all unnecessary information used by debuggers from your .NET classes. Also, class, interface, field and method identifiers are renamed to make them meaningless.
By using Skater .NET Obfuscator the obfuscation cannot be reversed.
Skater .NET Obfuscator has dual representation as a GUI interface and as a command-line tool as well. Skater .NET Obfuscator is designed to be seamlessly integrated into your build process that is why it has the command-line interface. This is done in the reliable and repeatable fashion when the obfuscation tool depends on a graphical user interface for operation.
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 Assembly Linker Interface
When packaging, during the assembly obfuscation, you can combine assemblies using the assembly linker. For example, instead of deploying main.dll, a.dll, and b.dll separately, you could deploy main.dll using the Assembly Linker interface that is a significant part of Skater .NET Obfuscator. The a.dll and b.dll will be joined into the main.dll
When distributing several closely related but separate DLLs is not that much of a plague, it would be a nice if, since they are so closely interlaced, you could merge these different assemblies into one. The ability to merge multiple libraries together would simplify deployment in many cases; applications that use several different languages or huge applications written in the same language but built upon many different projects would benefit from single-assembly deployment.
The Skater's special Linker interface is the utility that can link multiple modules into a single file for deployment. It does the linkage afterwards your main assembly has been obfuscated. The Linker interface intended for linking multiple managed executables or assemblies into a single module or assembly. The assigned referenced and non-referenced assemblies will be linked into your final obfuscated assembly afterwards when obfuscation is done for your current open assembly. NOTE: The linked assemblies will not be obfuscated. Please obfuscate the joined modules before Linkage. Or you may suggest secure the combined libraries after Linkage.
Usually, if all the functionality of your distributed application is not required at once, you might want to consider having the application divided into separate modules or libraries. The .NET runtime will load each component only when a type is referenced.
On the second hand, packaging everything into a single file will bring performance improvements, mostly because the loader does not have to take the time to resolve all the dependency issues. Also, you do not have to worry about missing dlls when your application is deployed.
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About Rustemsoft
