What does Obfuscar do?#

By Lex Li

Basically, Obfuscar scrambles the metadata in a set of assemblies. It renames everything to the minimal set of names that can be used to identify them, given signatures and type information. Since these new names are shorter than the old ones, it also dramatically shrinks executable size.

An Example#

The following method is from the example included in the release:

public ExampleUI( )
{
        InitializeComponent( );

        ClassX cx = new ClassX( "Some Text" );

        displayText.Text = cx.DisplayText;
}

The code can be decompiled (via ILSpy) to:

public ExampleUI()
{
        this.InitializeComponent();
        this.displayText.Text = new ClassX("Some Text").get_DisplayText();
}

After obfuscation, the code can be decompiled (via ILSpy) to:

public A()
{
        this.A();
        this.a.Text = new A.A("Some Text").A();
}

It’s a simple example, but it scales…For example, given a reasonably sized code base, one could easily run into a class named A (in the namespace A) with 7 methods, 4 properties, and 5 fields named A, with several more methods, properties, and fields named a.

To try it out, see Basic Example. The sample project demonstrates how to use Obfuscar NuGet package in your projects to perform obfuscation.

Caveat#

It makes debugging / reverse engineering very difficult, but wouldn’t stop someone who really wants to reverse engineer it. It would at least slow them down, and would deter casual observers.

Deobfuscators such as de4dot make it easy to reverse most protection a commercial obfuscator might set. But note that the names obfuscated by Obfuscar still remains useful, as what’s lost cannot be restored.

.NET Core Global Tools#

.NET Core 2.1 SDK introduces global tools, and Obfuscar can be used as a global tool since release 2.2.15.

  1. Visit the information page .

  2. Execute the command showed to install Obfuscar as a global tool.

  3. Once installed, run obfuscar.console command to perform obfuscation.

Important

Due to life cycle of .NET Core SDK, latest Obfuscar release only supports the Microsoft supported SDK version.