What is Obfuscation?

Obfuscation is used to lock your .NET application binary. Here locking is not done using any encryption algorithm. Microsoft .NET platform offers greater level of flexibility to develop applications. But reverse engineering of the source code is also easily possible.
Microsoft .NET platform uses MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) to produce executable code. This MSIL is higher level in nature than machine code.

One can use a de-compiler program to reverse engineer .NET applications. That means your source code is not safe. Here obfuscation technique comes in focus. To stop reverse engineering of .NET applications obfuscation can be used. It is not a encryption technique. Obfuscation convert meaningful terms in source code to non-meaningful. For example your source code contains variables named intEmployeeId, intNoofChildern, etc then these variable names converted to a, b, etc.

So due to obfuscation implementation source code becomes difficult to understand. Obfuscation is not a 100% proof technique to stop reverse engineering on your source code. But it makes your .NET application source code more secure.

Obfuscation technique even renames the names of methods, properties, functions, procedures, and events to meaning-less names. At the same time obfuscation take care of application’s performance. It is not affected due to obfuscation implementation. It keep your application intact.

Microsoft Visual Studio provides Dotfuscator tool to perform obfuscation since it 2003 release.