Welcome to the .NET Reactor Help file, which fully documents
the use of .NET Reactor. Please study this
document carefully, as it will answer many of your
pre-purchase and usage questions.
What is .NET Reactor?
.NET Reactor is a
powerful code protection and software licensing system
for software written for the .NET Framework, and supports all
languages that generate .NET assemblies. Its' main features are
:
- Intellectual property protection
- NecroBit Protection
- Native Code generation
- Obfuscation
- Control Flow Obfuscation
- String Encryption
- Anti Tampering
- Resource Encryption and Compression
- Dependency Merging
- Protects full applications and libraries
(dlls)
- Powerful licensing system
- Create trial versions of your software
- Set an expiration date
- Limit use to a fixed number of days after installation
- Limit by number of uses
- Limit to use for no more than a set number of minutes each
invocation
- Limit trial version functionality
- Easily turn your trial version into a fully licensed
version
- License your software
- Permanently (non expiring license)
- By time period (i.e rent your software)
- By number of uses (i.e software as a service)
- Software development kit
- Integrate license checking into you assembly and extend
licensing fuctionality
- Extend licensing functions with bespoke
extensions.
Why you need to
protect your intellectual property.
When you compile a program written for the Microsoft .NET
framework, the program you provide to your users is not
compiled into a native executable program, but instead is
translated into something called the Common Intermediate Language
instructions (CIL). CIL is half way between source code and native
code, and is interpreted by the .NET framework when your program is
run, rather than executed directly as machine code. Because of
this, the source code of your application or library can be easily
reproduced. Tools such as .NET Reflector (www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/) can reproduce
source code from a compiled .NET assemblies in seconds, and in
the .NET language of your choice! Clearly, commercial
software distributed to end users without some form of
protection is wide open to piracy and intellectual property
theft.
The traditional solution to intellectual property protection in
.NET is to use 'obfuscation', indeed Microsoft make an obfuscation
utility available to Visual Studio users.
So why is
obsfucation not enough?
Obfuscation is the process of making your source code more
difficult (but not impossible) for humans to understand.
Obfuscation works by replacing the meaningful names you assign to
classes, methods, properties and variables with meaningless ones.
For example, it may replace a variable name of "counter" with
"A4DF3CV89G" - to humans these obfuscated names are confusing and
difficult to remember, but have no effect on the NET Framework
interpreter. Note that obfuscation does nothing to the source code
within your methods, so it is not protected at all by obfuscation.
.NET Reactor does everything an obfuscator does, but then wraps
your intellectual property in several more layers of protection,
denying access to your source code to even those who are determined
to steal your hard work. .NET Reactor's protection has never been
cracked, something which cannot be said about obfuscators.
Industry Leading .NET Reactor
Source Protection
.NET Reactor prevents decompilation by a variety of methods which
convert your .NET assemblies into processes which no existing tool
can decompile ( and which are also very likely to prevent
decompilation by any future tool). .NET Reactor builds a native
code wall between potential hackers and your .NET assemblies by
producing a file which cannot be understood directly as CIL.
Because the CIL in your assembly is emitted intact only at run time
or design time (in a form in which the source is completely
inaccessible), no tool is capable of decompiling .NET Reactor
protected assemblies.
The native code wall created by .NET Reactor between the hacker and
your source includes industry leading NecroBit technology, which is
exclusive to .NET Reactor. .NET Reactor's protection has never been
broken since the first release in 2004. These technologies make
reconstruction of your source code more difficult by so many orders
of magnitude that NecroBit is by far the most effective protection
you can use for .NET assemblies.
In addition to industry leading intellectual property protection,
.NET Reactor provides powerful options for securing you revenue
stream by enforcing licensing terms with a rich variety of
trialversion and full version locks.
NET Reactor offers you simple and reliable ways to:
- Secure your .NET applications and .NET libraries
- Replace CIL code with native code
- Perform additional layers of protection, including
obfuscation
- Merge assemblies, and
- Protect your revenue by enforcing trial version restrictions and
full version licensing terms.
The protection mechanism is so simple you can download and install
.NET Reactor, and produce your first truly protected .NET assembly
in minutes, without any changes to your source code.
Supported Platforms : Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows
2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003/2008, Windows Vista, Windows 7
Supported Platforms (Mono) : Linux - SUSE, Novell, Red Hat, Mac -
OS X 10.3, 10.4, Solaris 8, BSD - OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD
About this online help
If you have any questions not answered by this help file, require
additional information to complete your evaluation or have any
suggestions for improving this help file, please get in touch with
us, we will be very happy to help.
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