Removing Assembly Metadata

[i]

Hi,

Is there a simple way to strip or otherwise disrupt/break the metadata
present in my .NET assembly? I understand there are $500 per
developer solutions out there that will change symbol names, obfuscate
control flow, encrypt string names, and so on. That's a bit more than
I'm looking for, though - I just want to find a way to prevent ildasm
from being able to parse through my programs. A hackish way would be
fine - ie, replacing several bytes in a hex editor or assembler. Any
ideas would be great.

Thanks!

[Marc Gravell]

Is there a simple way to strip or otherwise disrupt/break the metadata

present in my .NET assembly?

Erm no - this pretty much *is* your app. You can obfuscate, but the de-
obfuscatorswill always be only a few steps behind the obfuscators.

I'm looking for, though - I just want to find a way to prevent ildasm
from being able to parse through my programs.

Well, you can make it hard to understand (in any language) without too
much bother; "dotfuscator community edition" would be the first place
to look.

Marc

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

i <ty****@gmail.comwrote:

Is there a simple way to strip or otherwise disrupt/break the metadata
present in my .NET assembly? I understand there are $500 per
developer solutions out there that will change symbol names, obfuscate
control flow, encrypt string names, and so on. That's a bit more than
I'm looking for, though - I just want to find a way to prevent ildasm
from being able to parse through my programs. A hackish way would be
fine - ie, replacing several bytes in a hex editor or assembler. Any
ideas would be great.

How do you expect the runtime to cope with your assembly if ILDASM
can't? They're loading from the same specification, effectively.

--
Jon Skeet - <sk***@pobox.com>
http://www.pobox.com/~skeet Blog: http://www.msmvps.com/jon.skeet
If replying to the group, please do not mail me too

[Chris Dunaway]

On Aug 20, 1:53 am, i <[e-mail]:

Many commercial protection solutions advertise that metadata can be
made unreadable - obviously not to the .NET runtime, but to the
average person curious enough to look in it with something like
ildasm. There is a way to do this beyond renaming my methods, seeing
as there is software available that I have used that does this
automatically...

Perhaps this will interest you:

http://www.softwarepotential.com/code-protection.html

Chris