Protect .net app against piracy!

[rocky_upadhaya]

Hello!
I need some help and ideas on protecting the .net application (C# especially) against piracy either by adding some extra codes like in ActiveLock or other application protection tools. Please suggest me all the ideas you guys have. Protection in the sense that cd key and user key....I want to try all the possible tools. I tried ActiveLock but its implementation on csharp was little too difficult for me. Little guidence on this topic will really help me.

[BigEd781]

So, you will never find what you seem to be after. This is even more true of .NET apps because they are compiled to bytecode, not machine code. This means that I can easily see your source code by running your app through a program like .NET Reflector.

However, you shouldn't worry about this. You do not need to have a 100% secure app, or even 75% secure. All you need is some mechanism to keep the mostly honest people honest. The devious people who only wish to pirate your app will always succeed if they try hard enough and you will never be able to stop them. You don't need to stop them, they will never pay for your app anyway. A simple license key scheme will work for you, you don't need to go overboard and you definitely do not want to make the process onerous for the people who *did* pay for your app and just want to use it.

[rocky_upadhaya]

Thank you for your words but I like to have some knowledge on this topic too....Or is it totally foolish to have some knowledge on this topic??....Initially i am interested in licensing and serial keys because almost all software have them( open source and freewares excluded) and this may help in future in professional carrier.

[BigEd781]

I doubt that you will ever talk about licensing schemes on your resume. If you wish to learn about how this is typically done there are plenty of articles out there, but I am not completely sure what you are asking now
.

[Chris_F]

.NET is much easier to reverse engineer than languages that compile to native machine code. There exist .NET obfuscation code that will basically jumble the bytecode up a lot to make it harder to understand, though I'm sure this messes with performance.

I've looked into copy protection before and I've come to the conclusion that no protection is foolish, but overprotecting is just as foolish. Stick to just the most basic types of copy protection.

[Mutant_Fruit]

it may be possible to AOT your application on every target platfrom and then strip out the method bodies from all your managed code. Once your code is AOT'ed you shouldn't require the CIL code inside the methods anymore, which'd make it much harder to reverse engineer stuff.

http://groups.google.com/group/mono-...ts-using-cecil

The tool you need is 'mono-cil-strip'.

[rocky_upadhaya]

Thank You very much Mutant_Fruit, Other help will also be welcomed.