> Do you have any evidence that this would be any more
> difficult than disassembling a traditional Windows
> executable?  That is, it seems that it would take quite a bit
> of time to grok even a moderately sized assembly that had
> been decently obfuscated, eve n if looking at the source code
> generated by Reflector or a similar tool.

        It's far easier. The thing is: most people don't program for 
obfuscation, so their .exe doesn't have solely internal classes
and methods. This means that a lot of code is not really obfuscated. Even when 
it is, it's easy: when you use a 3rd party assembly,
for example Xheo, you have to call it at some point. Just hunt for the method 
call, it's there, unobfuscated.

        In a C++ dll this is harder because you just have offsets of in-memory 
mapped libs, which requires sophisticated tools to
get a proper overview.

> I haven't seen this "problem" discussed seriously in a few
> years.  Has a consensus been reached that obfuscation is not
> in fact a solution to the problem, or are you expressing your
> opinion?  In either case, what tests have been done?
>
> The person who started this thread should at least check out
> the products from Thinstall, Xenocode and RemoteSoft.

        Have you looked at these libs? I looked into them to see if I should 
roll my own protection code or buy a license from one
of these, though it was, sorry to say it, not very hard to track down where 
they stored the trial info for example, one of the weak
spots in licensing. The other weak spot, which is out of their hands, is that 
calls to their lib can't be obfuscated well enough.

                FB

>
> At 01:20 PM 9/7/2005, Christopher wrote (in part)
>
> >As Frans stated, even if you protect the product with
> licensing, it is
> >still very easy to decompile (and output source files!) .net
> >applications that are not obfuscated. Even then, if someone really
> >wants your code they could probably find a way to break the
> obfuscation.
>
>
> J. Merrill / Analytical Software Corp
>
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