

Windows Phone 7 developers – Obfuscate your app or have your source code stolen - ronnier
http://www.winrumors.com/windows-phone-7-developers-obsfucate-your-app-or-have-your-source-code-stolen/

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mquander
I completely fail to understand what the complaint is here.

It looks like users can download the application packages separately from the
WP7 magic install marketplace app. OK. Once you download the package, since
WP7 makes you write in .NET, anyone can just look at your executable and get
the MSIL back out of it, and decompile to C# or whatever.

So...what? This has been true for every C# application written since .NET
existed, on every platform. Welcome to the world of bytecode. What is
Microsoft supposed to do to magically change this on Windows Phone? Even if
they encrypted everything all the way down from the marketplace, as soon as
someone roots the phone, they could just look at the executable on disk,
right?

Why is bytecode obfuscation no longer an OK solution?

What am I missing here? I don't know anything about WP7.

EDIT: After looking around, I don't think I'm missing anything, I think it's
just FUD. However, it looks like there's a different actual issue, which is
that you can go download any app from the feed right now for free.

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rbanffy
If by decompiling you mean turning machine-language (or bytecode) into
equivalent human-readable source, it's also possible to do it in C.

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contextfree
The "fidelity" is typically much higher with .NET assemblies, because of the
type metadata. (Still a silly article, though.)

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bitwize
Don't .NET assemblies also encode _name_ metadata, making the transformation
from source to assembly mostly reversible?

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contextfree
Yes.

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durbin
isn't open code one of the reasons the web became the greatest achievement in
history?

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gpjt
Indeed -- and the problem doesn't sound any worse than it is for (say) .NET or
Java desktop apps.

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rbanffy
Complainers will always complain.

Imagine how nasty would it be when someone decompiles their code and discover
lots of, say, GPL code in there...

Is there a lot of GPL'ed C# code out there?

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johnny22
plenty of it, f-spot and banshee being 2 of the most popular. Most of them use
Qt# or Gtk#

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rbanffy
I bet a lot of it will find its way into proprietary closed-source
applications on the WinMo 7 platform...

