Introduction
PreEmptive Protection – Dotfuscator Community (formerly Dotfuscator CE) provides comprehensive .NET application protection that easily fits into your secure software development lifecycle. Use it to harden, protect, and prune desktop, mobile, server, and embedded applications to help secure trade secrets and other intellectual property (IP), reduce piracy and counterfeiting, and protect against tampering and unauthorized debugging. Dotfuscator works on compiled assemblies without the need for additional programming or even access to source code.
Why Protection Matters
It's important to protect your intellectual property (IP). Your application's code contains design and implementation details which can be considered IP. However, applications built on the .NET Framework contain significant metadata and high-level intermediate code, making them very easy to reverse engineer, just by using one of many free, automated tools. By disrupting and stopping reverse-engineering, you can prevent unauthorized IP disclosure, as well as demonstrate that your code contains trade secrets. Dotfuscator can obfuscate your .NET assemblies to hinder reverse-engineering, while maintaining original application behavior.
It's also important to protect the integrity of your application. In addition to reverse-engineering, bad actors may attempt to pirate your application, alter the application's behavior at runtime, or manipulate data. Dotfuscator can inject your application with the capability to detect, report, and respond to unauthorized uses, including tampering, third-party debugging, and rooted devices.
For more information on how Dotfuscator fits into a secure software development lifecycle, see our SDL App Protection page.
About Dotfuscator Community
Your copy of Microsoft Visual Studio includes a free license for PreEmptive Protection - Dotfuscator Community. For instructions on how to install the version of Dotfuscator Community included with Visual Studio, see the Installation page. Please note that these instructions apply only to Visual Studio versions 2017 and 2019, as previous versions were installed with Dotfuscator Community by default.
Dotfuscator Community offers a range of software protection and hardening services for developers, architects and testers. Examples of .NET Obfuscation and other Application Protection features included in Dotfuscator Community are:
Renaming of identifiers to make reverse-engineering of the compiled assemblies more difficult.
Anti-tamper to detect the execution of tampered applications, transmit incident alerts, and terminate tampered sessions.
Anti-debug to detect the attachment of a debugger to a running application, transmit incident alerts, and terminate debugged sessions.
Anti-rooted device to detect if the application is running on a rooted Android device, transmit incident alerts, and terminate sessions on these devices.
Application expiration behaviors that encode an "end-of-life" date, transmit alerts when applications are executed after their expiration date, and terminate expired application sessions.
Exception tracking to monitor unhandled exceptions occurring within the application.
Session and feature usage tracking to determine what applications have been executed, what versions of those applications, and what features are used in those applications.
For details on these features, including how they fit into your application protection strategy, see the Capabilities page.
Dotfuscator Community offers basic protection out-of-the-box. Even more application protection measures are available to registered users of Dotfuscator Community, and to users of PreEmptive Protection - Dotfuscator Professional, the world's leading .NET Obfuscator. For information about enhancing Dotfuscator, see the Upgrades page.
Getting Started
To begin using Dotfuscator Community from Visual Studio, type dotfuscator
into the Quick Launch (Ctrl+Q) search bar.
If Dotfuscator Community is already installed, this will bring up the Menu option to start the Dotfuscator Community user interface. See the Getting Started page for user interface instructions.
If Dotfuscator Community is not yet installed, this will bring up the relevant Install option. See the Installation page for details.
You can also get the latest version of Dotfuscator Community from the Dotfuscator Downloads page.