prevent decompling .class

[S Shehab]

Hi Guys,

i need to prevent anyone to decompile my .class , is there a way to do this ?

[Rob Spoor]

Search for obfuscation / obfuscators.

[Ulf Dittmer]

Bottom line: no. There are ways to make it harder, but in the end, a determined attacker will prevail.

What kind of application is this? Why is it important not to be decompiled? What are you trying to guard against? Maybe there are other ways of addressing that.

[S Shehab]

Ulf Dittmer wrote:Bottom line: no. There are ways to make it harder, but in the end, a determined attacker will prevail.

What kind of application is this? Why is it important not to be decompiled? What are you trying to guard against? Maybe there are other ways of addressing that.

Hi Ulf ,
Actually it's a reporting tool i developed for a company with 2 versions desktop and web , and we agreed that any further updates must be made by me only , so i wanna prevent anyone to see my code ,so he can do updates , what is the "obfuscation / obfuscators" ? so is there a way to achieve this ?

[Ulf Dittmer]

Do you really think end users will decompile an application so they can make changes to it and then continue to use it? That sounds a bit far-fetched. There aren't many meaningful changes that could be made without needing to make server changes as well (I'm assuming that the tool uses a DB for its data).

Some strategies for making decompilation harder are described in http://faq.javaranch.com/java/AppletsFaq#decompilation (it's about applets, but the same principles hold for desktop apps).