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Obfuscation of WPF applications (status update)

ScottGu’s recent WPF4 Beta2 post had a comment asking about obfuscation:

# re: WPF 4 (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 5:58 AM by john

Yeah, but what about the ability to obfuscate your WPF app?

In WPF4 we haven’t improved that yet, however we’ve made progress towards that goal.

WPF has a Baml2006Reader class that can be used by Obfuscation engines to analyze types/members used in BAML.  Unfortunately, WPF4 doesn’t yet include the corresponding Baml2006Writer that we had hoped to include.

It is in our backlog, and we hope to be able to address a number of customer concerns by providing the Baml2006Writer in the future.

Update

You are able to obfuscate types that aren’t mentioned in BAML just fine, by the way.  So it isn’t that you can’t obfuscate WPF apps.  You just don’t have the power to obfuscate them as much.

Published Tuesday, October 27, 2009 2:39 PM by Rob_Relyea
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Comments

# Obfuscation of WPF applications (status update)@ Tuesday, October 27, 2009 8:17 PM

DotNetBurner - burning hot .net content

by DotNetBurner - WPF

# re: Obfuscation of WPF applications (status update)@ Tuesday, October 27, 2009 8:47 PM

I've had pretty reasonable success obfuscating WPF 3.0/3.5 applications with current obfuscators. As you point out it is really only the names of types and their properties that are referenced by BAML that you can't obfuscate. Some obfuscators allow you to do obfuscation of method internals without changing the names, and you can still do that with WPF apps.

by JosephCooney

# Dew Drop – October 28, 2009 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew@ Wednesday, October 28, 2009 8:26 AM

Pingback from  Dew Drop – October 28, 2009 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

by Dew Drop – October 28, 2009 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

# re: Obfuscation of WPF applications (status update)@ Wednesday, October 28, 2009 1:55 PM

Rob,

I've done a review of a few obfuscators for Silverlight on my blog:

www.olsonsoft.com/.../Selecting-an-obfuscator-for-Silverlight.aspx

Interestingly, although the xaml could be changed (updating obfuscated names of events etc.) because it's not compiled none of the tools are yet doing that.

..Stefan

by Stefan Olson

# re: Obfuscation of WPF applications (status update)@ Tuesday, November 03, 2009 3:22 PM

I have been using .NET Reactor (code encryption, control obfuscation, string encryption etc etc..) for years now (desktop apps) and I am very satisfied so far. Latest version seems to support WPF as well.

by Jason

# re: Obfuscation of WPF applications (status update)@ Friday, November 20, 2009 5:58 AM

Further update: Crypto Obfuscator ( www.ssware.com/.../obfuscator-net.htm ) can now intelligently exclude WPF-related types/methods/properties from obfuscation which is a huge time saver when

obfuscating WPF apps.

by Himangi

# re: Obfuscation of WPF applications (status update)@ Sunday, February 28, 2010 5:33 AM

Crypto Obfuscator seems to work fine with WPF/Xaml, what, is it not recommended? pitfalls?

by Kommand

# re: Obfuscation of WPF applications (status update)@ Thursday, October 14, 2010 12:42 AM

Crypto Obfuscator: the latest version can now rename symbol references in XAML/BAML files instead of just exlcuding them. It also removes all comments, indents, newlines, whitespace, etc from the XAML files.

by Himangi

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