Wednesday, 8 November 2006

Dotfuscator to Enhance Application Security in Visual Studio

Microsoft has revealed that an enhanced version of Dotfuscator Community Edition (CE), a tool used to protect code from theft and from hackers looking for security vulnerabilities, which will be included in the next release of Microsoft Visual Studio. "Protecting intellectual property and preventing application vulnerability probing are two important issues for software developers today," said Prashant Sridharan, group product manager in the Developer Division at Microsoft. "Obfuscation is an important component of Microsoft’s application life-cycle management solution, and PreEmptive Solutions’ latest version of Dotfuscator CE represents a significant enhancement to the Visual Studio platform."

According to Gartner, "The use of interpreted languages, such as Java and managed .NET code, makes reverse compilation a relatively simple task, providing the hacker the ability to steal Intellectual Property (IP) or look for security vulnerabilities".

Gartner recommends, "If you have IP embedded in your software applications that are distributed externally to your enterprise, use code obfuscation, encryption and randomisation products to protect deployed applications from reverse-engineering."

"PreEmptive Solutions is the only application security provider to offer patented obfuscation technology, encryption and randomisation capabilities," said Gabriel Torok, president of PreEmptive Solutions. "Up until this release, the integration to be offered with Visual Studio was only available to users who licensed commercial obfuscators and remains, even today, completely absent from Java IDEs."