Protect .NET code from reverse engineering?

Question

Obfuscation is one way, but it can\'t protect from breaking the piracy protection security of the application. How do I make sure that the application is not tampered with,

Answer 1

Well, you cannot FULLY protect your product from being cracked, but you can maximize/enhance the security levels and make it a little bit too difficult to be cracked by newbies and intermediate crackers.

But bear in mind nothing is uncrackable, only the software on server side is well protected and cannot be cracked. Anyway, to enhance the security levels in your application, you can do some simple steps to prevent some crackers "not all" from cracking your applications. These steps will make these crackers go nuts and maybe desperate:

• Obfuscate your source code, obviously this will make your source code look like a mess and unreadable.
• Trigger several random checking routines inside your application like every two hours, 24 hours, one day, week, etc. or maybe after every action the user take.
• Save your released application's MD5 checksum on your server and implement a routine that can check the current file MD5 checksum with the real one on you server side and make it randomly triggered. If the MD5 checksum has been changed that means this copy has been pirated. Now you can just block it or release an update to block it, etc.
• Try to make a routine that can check if some of your codes (functions, classes, or specific routines) are actually have been modified or altered or even removed. I call it (code integrity check).
• Use free unknown packers to pack your application. Or, if you have the money, go for commercial solutions such as Thamida or .NET Reactor. Those applications get updated regularly and once a cracker unpack your application, you can just get a new update from those companies and once you get the new update, you just pack your program and release a new update.
• Release updates regularly and force your customer to download the latest update.
• Finally make your application very cheap. Don't make it too expensive. Believe me, you will get more happy customers and crackers will just leave your application, because it isn't worth their time to crack a very cheap application.

Those are just simple methods to prevent newbies and intermediate crackers from cracking your application. If you have more ideas to protect your application just don't be shy to implement them. It will just make crackers lives hard, and they will get frustrated, and eventually they will leave your application, because it's just doesn't worth their time.

Lastly, you also need to consider spending your time on coding a good and quality applications. Don't waste your time on coding complicated security layers. If a good cracker wants to crack your application he/she will do no matter what you do...

Now go and implement some toys for the crackers...