Clinical Decision Support System

Obfuscation Techniques

.NET obfuscators employ various techniques to protect code from reverse engineering:

Renaming:
* Changes method and variable names to obscure their purpose.

Control Flow Obfuscation:
* Alters the code's execution flow to make it harder to understand.
* Common approaches include:
* Opaque Predicates: Adds irrelevant conditional statements to create complex branches.
* Control Flow Graph Transformation: Introduces non-intuitive paths, loops, or branches.
* Instruction Substitution: Replaces simple instructions with complex ones.
* Code Splitting: Breaks code into parts and introduces indirect calls or jumps.
* Control Flow Flattening: Converts complex flow into hidden state machines.
* Exception Handling Obfuscation: Modifies exception handling to obscure logic.

String Encryption:
* Encrypts string literals to prevent easy extraction.

Anti-debugging/Anti-tampering Features:
* Protects against reverse engineering by preventing debugging or modification of the code.

These techniques vary across obfuscators, with some implementing proprietary or advanced methods for enhanced security. By combining these techniques, obfuscators increase the complexity of code, making it more resistant to reverse engineering and analysis.