Microsoft® .NET Kick Start

Obfuscating .NET Applications

By now, you understand that .NET Framework programs (applications, Web services, Web applications, shared libraries, and so on) are compiled to intermediate language and converted to the native machine code only when executed by the JIT Compiler. Although this has a number of benefits, including underlying architecture independence, language independence, and true language interoperability, it also has a side effect that the generated MSIL code isn't very hard to understand and effectively could be decompiled back into source code. In some scenarios, this is a significant security concern because there is a potential risk of losing intellectual property related to the code. In fact, a couple of decompilers are already ...