Exe file security

Question

Hi! I just build little security app for my PC, just for personal use. After I build .exe, I had a look on it (file.exe) just through Notepad and unfortunately I can see all paths, button names, etc. easily readable from the file only using Notepad. Is there anything, what can I do to do it more safe??? thx

Marek · Answer

thanks a lot. I'll have a look around. thank you.

Alan · Answer

It's actually even worse than that Marek. If you use a free tool such as .NET Reflector (link below) you can recover the entire source code of your C# application! The only thing that can't be recovered is local variable names and comments which are lost when the application is compiled to intermediate language - the former just become numbered storage locations. http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/ This is a big problem if you are using .NET to develop commercial applications. It's possible to use an obfuscator to make the code very difficult to read and there's a free one Dotfuscator Community Edition which is packaged with Visual Studio: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms227240.aspx You should also look for ways to avoid hard coding strings. However for protection against professional hackers you need the Professional edition or similar very expensive tools which include string encryption facilities. One other thing you can do which costs nothing is to put sensitive stuff in a C dll and then P/Invoke it from C#. It's much harder to crack unmanaged code particularly if you use obfuscation tools on that as well.