How to write your own .NET obfuscator

Question

I am very curious how people write their own obfuscator.

How difficult it would be to do the following:

• rename all public methods with GUID type names.

Where to begin? How can I read the .net dll assembly, pull out the public methods and rename them?

Answer 1

You can check out the two projects that use Cecil to write an open source obfuscator:

• http://code.google.com/p/obfuscar/
• http://www.codeplex.com/SharpObfuscator

Answer 2

Jason Haley has excellent links ...

Answer 3

If you start from the source, it is quite simple to replace the text and then run the code through the compiler. If you start with a compiled assembly, you need to use the material in the System.Reflection namespace to load the assembly and System.CodeDom to generate compiled blocks of code.