An Unhackable Program!

[AlexPlunkett]

There are some VB decompilers out there. How can I make my program unhackable if decompiled, or maybe turn everything into random characters?

[kleinma]

You can use an obfuscator which will scramble much of the internal code of your application. It does not prevent decompiling, but when it is decompiled, all the methods and such are renamed to make it very hard to reverse engineer.

For example a routine called CheckCustomerLicense() would be renamed to a()

Most of these obfuscators use rename overloading so it will also rename 100 other methods to a() where they won't conflict with eachother, so it gets very hard to trace back routines and someone smart enough to figure that out could likely write the same app themselves from scratch in half the time.

Depending on what version of Visual Studio you have, dotfuscator from PreEmptive may be included, otherwise I still think they have a free version you can download from their site. There are other obfuscator products out there as well if you do some searches.

You won't be able to make your program "unhackable". Companies like Microsoft and Apple have been trying to do that since computers first came around...

[AlexPlunkett]

Is there a way to turn my variables to random ASCII chars?

[kleinma]

I have seen some programs that encrypt your entire exe and decrypt the exe as it runs to provide extra layers of protection, however this results in slower execution because the program has to decrypt itself before it can run properly. I also have never seen one of these programs that was not pretty expensive to license.

[Philly0494]

preventing your program from being reflected or comprehensively and significantly disassembled is much different than defending it against hackers.

[Megalith]

An average hacker will be able to bypass code without dissassembling it anyway, they are looking for key phrases (they run the app it says 'Please get a License') they then look for this string and from there they look for a conditional jump and then change that byte of code so it works unless it is licensed) you need to encrypt such strings within the app, again a good hacker will know this and will type the phrase into some software that provides various encryptions and compressions on this string and search for that.

see the problem? the nature of code is it follows rules that are predictable (if it didn't the code wouldn't work) the best you can do is make the hackers job as hard as possible and therefore make it not worth the time or effort, but hackers have a lot of time normally lol

Myself i like to break my code into chunks that need to all work in order to work, if the code is changed then the code will error silently and exit. in a way it is like snakes and ladders, the software engineers are ladders and the hackers are snakes lol

[Jenner]

Nothing is uncrackable. It all has to go through the processor at some point unencrypted.

[Megalith]

Nothing is uncrackable. It all has to go through the processor at some point unencrypted.

On that subject i have heard of people change WoW (the x86 emulator in vista/win7) so they can directly access the code as it looks to the processor.