What is Incremental Obfuscation?
Our customers in the Java space quickly told us they needed this feature. The problem was that they distributed their obfuscated code and their customers found a bug in their product. They wanted to issue a patch to fix their customer’s problems, but because of obfuscation, this always wasn’t possible. Fixing bugs in their code created or deleted classes, methods, or fields and caused subsequent obfuscation runs to rename things slightly differently. Unfortunately, what was renamed differently and how it was renamed differently was a mystery. Dotfuscator Professional (and DashO Pro Java obfuscation) includes incremental obfuscation to combat that problem. Dotfuscator creates a map file to tell you how it did renaming. Therefore, if you get a stack trace from your customer, you can match it to the mapfile and find out what unobfuscated class your bug is in (obviously you should treat your mapfile as confidential).
The method of software update via patching is fairly common among producers of software. In that case the client does not receive the entire set of files, but only a limited amount of updated files. A different method of obfuscation, called incremental obfuscation needs to be used for this practice, so that the references between assemblies and assembly members will not be disrupted.
Our customers quickly told us they needed this feature. The problem was that they distributed their obfuscated code and their customers found a bug in their product and they wanted to issue a patch to fix their customer’s problems. But because of obfuscation, this always wasn’t possible. Fixing bugs in their code created or deleted classes, methods, or fields and caused subsequent obfuscation runs to rename things slightly differently. Unfortunately, what was renamed differently and how it was renamed differently was a mystery. Dotfuscator Professional obfuscation includes incremental obfuscation to combat that problem. Dotfuscator creates a map file to tell you how it did renaming. Therefore, if you get a stack trace from your customer, you can match it to the mapfile and find out the unobfuscated class name. Obviously you should treat your mapfile as confidential. The same mapfile can be used as input to Dotfuscator on subsequent runs to dictate that renames used previously should be
