Obfuscator .NET - Skater .NET Obfuscator

Skater .NET Obfuscator

Story behind Skater .NET Obfuscator

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.

Skater .NET Obfuscator is a comprehensive professional solution for .NET application code protection. With Skater .NET Obfuscator you can easily protect Microsoft .NET framework applications from illegal code extraction and reverse engineering. Moreover, you do not need any source code changes or programming experience to accomplish professional software protection of your programs. Skater .NET Obfuscator reconstructs your .NET assemblies to the new view that is impracticable to be understand, and impossible to decompile.

Update in ver8.8: Skater now works much better because it has been refined to prevent deobfuscators. Skater can NOT easily be hacked and deobfuscated by the cotemporary open source deobfuscators. That deciphering hacker's tools definitely do NOT work in renaming class/method/property/field names with the Skater .NET Obfuscator. Strings values are NOT unraveled as well.

Main features of Skater .NET Obfuscator

Prohibits reverse engineering
Obfuscated application usually is not recompilable
Prevents DEOBFUSCATION Symbols Renaming
Supports .NET Core 2.0 projects
Processes any .NET application, executable or assembly
Encrypts string constants
Compatible with any .NET framework from 1.0 through 4.5
Control flow obfuscation stops decompilers and deobfuscators
Scrambles class names, method names, field names etc.
Protects XAML (baml) files in WPF application
It works well on both (x86 and x64) platforms
Provides .NET Licensing features
Implements .NET Code Extension for small .NET applications protection.
Implements assemblies linkage; linker unites .NET assemblies into a single dll or exe

A couple of weeks ago I got license of Rustemsoft Skater .NET Obfuscator Professional Edition. For the uninitiated, obfuscated code is harder to read in ILSpy ver1.0.0.1000, so people cannot nick your secrets as easily. I was highly contented with what Skater produced, in that the class names were renamed to unreadable chars. The method names also followed this convention, and there seems to be method overloading too, where differently-named methods with different signatures are obfuscated as methods with the same name. Also Skater protects methods' code and the code is not visible with ILSpy. This is because the Skater Pro Edition has Control Flow protection mode enabled.
Now I use Skater on every .NET project - thank you folks!
Hector Maria Miguel
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
Mexico City

I want to thank you for the outstanding service, despite the fact that I am only a hundred bucks customer.
Wishing you all the best!
Thierry Biekens
Netherlands

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

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

Our technology is well protected by Skater. As an obfuscator it does it's job well without gouging you on price like some of it's competitors. As a bonus we find that the built-in linker has great potential for version control and object distribution purposes.
It's a great product and the price cannot be beat.

Mark R Neff
President
MKP Inc
Houston, Tx, USA

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

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

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

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.

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.

Cardinal obfuscation techniques:

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.

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.

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.

Example

Let's try to write a simple command-line application and then obfuscate it. The following console programs are the VB.NET and C# version of the "Hello World!" program, which displays the string "Hello World!" Actually it is not the traditional "Hello World!" and it displays in addition today's date and current time. We have added couple of private variables to see what happen when we obfuscate them.

VB .NET

Imports System
Module Module1
Private str As String = "Hello World! Today is:"
Private today As Date = Now
Sub Main()
Console.WriteLine(str + CStr(today))
End Sub
End Module

using System;
struct Module1
{
private string str = "Hello World! Today is:";
private System.DateTime today = Now;
void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine(str + System.Convert.ToString(today));
}
}

You can see four highlighted members' names. Two are private variables' names today and str. Module1 is name of the class. Main is name of method that is single method in the simple class.
Now we are ready to compile the simple code in .NET environment. We may get ConsoleApplication1.exe executable file as a result of compilation. What is inside in the executable? Why do people say we need to hide our .NET stuff?
The .NET Framework SDK ships with a disassembler utility called ILDasm that allows you to decompile .NET assemblies into IL (Intermediate Language) Assembly Language statements. To decompile the ConsoleApplication1.exe file start ILDasm on the command line. Take a look what we got after the decompilation:

.class private auto ansi sealed beforefieldinit Module1
extends [mscorlib]System.Object
{
.custom instance void [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.
StandardModuleAttribute::.ctor() = ( 01 00 00 00 )
.field private static string str
.field private static valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime today
.method private specialname rtspecialname static
void .cctor() cil managed
{
.maxstack 8
IL_0000: ldstr "Hello World! Today is:"
IL_0005: stsfld string ConsoleApplication1.Module1::str
IL_000a: call valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.
VisualBasic.DateAndTime::get_Now()
IL_000f: stsfld valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime ConsoleApplication1.Module1::today
IL_0014: nop
IL_0015: ret
} // end of method Module1::.cctor
.method public static void Main() cil managed
{
.entrypoint
.custom instance void [mscorlib]System.STAThreadAttribute::.ctor() = ( 01 00 00 00 )
.maxstack 8
IL_0000: nop
IL_0001: ldsfld string ConsoleApplication1.Module1::str
IL_0006: ldsfld valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime ConsoleApplication1.Module1::today
IL_000b: call string [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.StringType::
FromDate(valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime)
IL_0010: call string [mscorlib]System.String::Concat(string,
string)
IL_0015: call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
IL_001a: nop
IL_001b: nop
IL_001c: ret
} // end of method Module1::Main
} // end of class Module1

Everything looks pretty obvious and understandable in the IL script. Is not it? Right, it is hard to figure out the IL code for us more mortals. So if you are now guessing your .NET source code will be accessible only to a small circle of technical folks who actually know IL Assembly Language, think again. You can take this step further and actually recreate the source code by using some much sophisticated decompilers. These decompilation tools can decompile a .NET assembly directly back to a high level language like C#, VB .NET, or C++.
Ok, we are ready to obfuscate the sample ConsoleApplication1.exe executable by using Skater .NET Obfuscator. Open the exe file in Skater Obfuscator. In the Obfuscator interface go to Options tab and select 'Alpha-Numeric characters' under 'Naming Conventions'. Choose all Private and all Public members obfuscation mode.
When you run the obfuscated ConsoleApplication1.exe it produces the same result. Take a look what changed inside the simple program. We need to run the ILDasm.exe again against the new obfuscated executable and it will give us the following IL script:

.class private auto ansi sealed beforefieldinit '0AAAA'
extends [mscorlib]System.Object
{
.custom instance void [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.
StandardModuleAttribute::.ctor() = ( 01 00 00 00 )
.field private static string '1AAA0'
.field private static valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime '2AAAA'
.method private specialname rtspecialname static
void .cctor() cil managed
{
.maxstack 8
IL_0000: ldstr "Hello World! Today is:"
IL_0005: stsfld string ConsoleApplication1.'0AAAA'::'1AAA0'
IL_000a: call valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.
VisualBasic.DateAndTime::get_Now()
IL_000f: stsfld valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime ConsoleApplication1.'0AAAA'::'2AAAA'
IL_0014: nop
IL_0015: ret
} // end of method '0AAAA'::.cctor
.method public static void '1AAAA'() cil managed
{
.entrypoint
.custom instance void [mscorlib]System.STAThreadAttribute::.ctor() = ( 01 00 00 00 )
.maxstack 8
IL_0000: nop
IL_0001: ldsfld string ConsoleApplication1.'0AAAA'::'1AAA0'
IL_0006: ldsfld valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime ConsoleApplication1.'0AAAA'::'2AAAA'
IL_000b: call string [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.StringType::
FromDate(valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime)
IL_0010: call string [mscorlib]System.String::Concat(string,
string)
IL_0015: call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
IL_001a: nop
IL_001b: nop
IL_001c: ret
} // end of method '0AAAA'::'1AAAA'
} // end of class '0AAAA'

Skater .NET Obfuscator just replaced member names with alpha-numeric combinations that makes harder to understand the code. However it is not so big trick and every Obfuscator can do that. Everyone can replace the alpha-numeric char combinations with some eye-friendly names. Moreover, by using ILasm.exe (one more .NET Framework SDK assembler utility that allows you to compile IL code back into an executable) we can easily recompile the obfuscated IL output and it will work without problems.
Skater .NET Obfuscator can generate a non-recompilable executables. See the IL script below.

.class private auto ansi sealed beforefieldinit '?'
extends [mscorlib]System.Object
{
.custom instance void [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.
StandardModuleAttribute::.ctor() = ( 01 00 00 00 )
.field private static string '?'
.field private static valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime '?'
.method private specialname rtspecialname static
void .cctor() cil managed
{
.maxstack 8
IL_0000: ldstr "Hello World! Today is:"
IL_0005: stsfld string ConsoleApplication1.'?'::'?'
IL_000a: call valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.
VisualBasic.DateAndTime::get_Now()
IL_000f: stsfld valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime ConsoleApplication1.'?'::'?'
IL_0014: nop
IL_0015: ret
} // end of method '?'::.cctor
.method public static void '?'() cil managed
{
.entrypoint
.custom instance void [mscorlib]System.STAThreadAttribute::.ctor() = ( 01 00 00 00 )
.maxstack 8
IL_0000: nop
IL_0001: ldsfld string ConsoleApplication1.'?'::'?'
IL_0006: ldsfld valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime ConsoleApplication1.'?'::'?'
IL_000b: call string [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.StringType::
FromDate(valuetype [mscorlib]System.DateTime)
IL_0010: call string [mscorlib]System.String::Concat(string,
string)
IL_0015: call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
IL_001a: nop
IL_001b: nop
IL_001c: ret
} // end of method '?'::'?'
} // end of class '?'

Sure, the presented above IL code can not be compiled or the compiled executable will not work well. As you can see all member names has the same single '?' character representation. We can get the result by using Skater .NET Obfuscator special settings. In the Obfuscator interface go to Options tab and select '?' characters under 'Naming Conventions'.
The member names obfuscation is the very first essential step of .NET assembly obfuscation. You need to apply other Skater .NET Obfuscator methods and algorithms to better secure your .NET apps.

You need the Skater .NET Obfuscator for the following reasons:

1. You have a clear understanding of obfuscation benefits and appropriate use cases.
2. You generally understand that obfuscation prevents source code extraction.
3. You have practical understanding of how and when obfuscation should be used.
4. Also your organization has a consistent approach to assessing the risk of source code extraction.

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About Rustemsoft

Rustemsoft LLC is a creative ISV (Independent Software Vendor) specializes in intelligent software solutions for Xcode programmers, XML designers, and .NET developers. Customers always choose Rustemsoft for the high quality and the reliability of our products and services in XML Data development, iOS application design, and .NET software solutions.

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