We have a core assembly that we wish to obfuscate and make available to 3rd party developers. Most of the obfuscation tools I’ve looked at mention that it garbles the internals against decompilers and reflectors but that the names of public methods and properties are left as is (which makes sense). But what about ‘protected’ members?
Say I have a base class that I’ve got some cool helper methods and properties in and I want to make this available to 3rd party developers to tap into so they can simply inherit from my base class and have some of the plumbing already in place for them. Obviously this won’t be much help if its garbled by an obfuscator. So my question is, what is possible to do with these obfuscator tools? Can you specify that it NOT garble protected methods too? Or alternately can you configure what it garbles and what it doesn’t? I have no experience with obfuscators in .NET so I’m trying to learn all the ins and outs, thanks
I’ve worked with several obfuscators for .net and none of them were obfuscating protected member names in public classes, which makes sense as it will potentially break your application. The whole idea of obfuscation is to keep you application behavior and public APIs the same as before obfuscation.
In addition, most of the obfuscators allow you to exclude certain non-public classes/members from obfuscation (e.g. using custom attributes) – sometimes this might be required when you use reflection, IoC containers for dependency injection etc.