Understand how Shield protections work

Shield protections are different layers of security and obfuscation that are applied individually or jointly to your application.

Unlike other obfuscators, Shield protections have the following characteristics:

• They are compatible with each other, although you can use them in isolation, when combined they use shared parameters that make security dependent on each of the layers, making the protection more robust.
• They check integrity at each layer, unlike basic obfuscation tools, they not only modify the visibility of your code, but also add extra integrity checks to ensure that the code is not modified.
• They adapt automatically, you don't have to worry about whether your application is Xamarin, Blazor or a .NET Core API, they automatically detect where they are being applied and configure their parameters intelligently.
• They are always up to date, in the world of security, deobfuscation and manipulation techniques advance quickly, buying security software and not receiving updates for a couple of months, or it being tedious to update is a risk for you. Shield has cloud protections, so you don't have to worry about that every time you protect, you are using the latest technology.
• Advanced customization, Shield allows you to define actions in case the protections need to take a response to a specific situation, for example, you can decide what should happen in your application if an unauthorized external debugger is detected.
• Detailed configuration, protections are pre-configured by default and adapt intelligently by modifying their configuration, but if you wish, you have parameters, modes, and configurations for each of them.
• Exclusions and configurations from code, you can easily exclude certain protections from certain parts of the code and even modify their configuration for specific parts of the code.
• Advanced debugging, you can use security privileges to debug your protected applications even when the debugger prevention option is active.
• Stacktrace and advanced exception management, with Shield you can get full exception information without the obfuscation applied to them.
• Stability, there are obfuscation options with Code Virtualization (usually, easy to de-virtualize) that generate compatibility, performance, and execution problems in large or enterprise applications. Shield offers security that gives you reliability in operation, ensuring that it works and does not noticeably affect the performance of your application.

Prevention Protections

Obfuscation Protections

Advanced and Integrity Protections

Metadata and Resource Protections

Useful documentation on protections

How to exclude protections from certain parts of the code

How to debug protected applications

How to work with obfuscated exceptions

Configuration files for protections