News

PreEmptive Solutions bolsters Dotfuscator and DashO

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• April 25, 2005

In an effort to help companies develop secure applications for Microsoft .NET and Java, PreEmptive Solutions released Dotfuscator Professional Edition 3.0 and DashO 3.2.

Companies’ efforts surrounding intellectual property protection and code security increased after recent news reports about personal identification information, gathered by companies such as ChoicePoint and Lexis Nexis, that was breached by hackers. Digital watermarking applications are a new way for corporations to protect against pirating sensitive individual and corporate applications.

Dotfuscator and DashO protect software against hackers’ attempts to steal intellectual property and programming secrets or find security holes in applications. They now feature a new digital code watermark that can hide customer identification or copyright information in software applications. The digital watermark identifies rightful owners of software or tracks the origin of a pirated copy.

Dotfuscator now offers assembling linking, which allows users to send the minimum bits that a .NET framework-based application needs to run. The tool also features the ability to select library mode on a per assembly basis, an improved algorithm for finding external assembly dependencies with a user-specified assembly load path as a fall back, and incorporates code security into the development lifecycle. It supports Visual Studio 2005 and is integrated with MSBuild, an XML-based build engine that will ship with Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0.

DashO targets Java-based applications, offering extraction of classes from directories, zips or jars and automated stack trace translation, as well as supports all Java development kits, including J2EE, JSE and J2ME, up to and including 1.5. The tool also supports packaging for different Java types, such as applications, applets, servlets, libraries and Enterprise JavaBeans.

Both tools also include pruning, control flow obfuscation, string encryption, property protection and decreased application size. Pricing starts at $1,495 per user.