Merged dll's and Virtual Box difference

[Poseidon77]

Hi,

In a .net project, what's the difference(s) between ILMerged dlls and dlls in the Virtual Box ?
Does Virtual Box provide strongest protection than ILMerge technique?

[Enigma]

Hi Poseidon77,

I can't tell you what one serves the better protection. ILMerged, as far as I know, just merges assemblies, Virtual Box feature emulates the files.

Moreover, with ILMerged you can't merge unmanaged dll files, or any other kind of files.

Probably, would be good to use both techniques, if possible.

[Poseidon77]

Ok. I understand you. If I merge my .net exe and my .net dlls on a new c# exe using ILmerge tool, and then protect this new exe, will enigma protector protect my dlls codes that inside the merged exe?

[Enigma]

No, if you merge dll and exe using LMerge, then protection will nothing know about these dll files.

So as for protection side, then I would recommend to embed all dll files (and not only dll files) into Virtual Box.

[Poseidon77]

Do you mean ILMerge not making a single exe mixing dll and main exe codes?
So in a merged exe how does enigma protector decide to protect only main exe codes? And why is not protecting codes that comes from dll inside a merged exe? How can Enigma know and seperate codes inside a merged exe?

[Enigma]

The difference there is that ILMerge works not same as Virtual Box feature.

ILMerge merges assemblies, so after you use it and got final exe file, then it would be impossible to determine if the exe file contained external assemblies in dll files or no.

Apart of this, Virtual Box feature does not merge assemblies, it emulates virtual files in memory. The main exe still does not contain assembles from dll files, but the protection emulates the calls of this exe to external dll files and return necessary results.