Introduction - RetroGuard Documentation

Welcome to the RetroGuard User's Guide. This guide explains how to use the RetroGuard bytecode obfuscator to protect your Java code against decompilation and reverse engineering.

About RetroGuard

RetroGuard is a bytecode obfuscator, a tool designed to replace the human-readable identifiers and attributes in your Java classes with meaningless strings, making reverse engineering of the code almost impossible. The result is smaller code sizes for your shipping product and confidence that your valuable Java source code is secure.

RetroGuard is distributed under several licensing options:

• if you are commercial, use RetroGuard Pro under an annual license and support agreement;
• if you are academic or not-for-profit, use RetroGuard Lite under a non-commercial license at no charge;
• if you are an open-source tools developer, you may be interested in integrating the RetroGuard Library, which is provided under the GNU General Public License.

Features include:

• reduced size of Java bytecode (savings of up to 50% are possible, 20-30% is typical) leading to faster download times for your applets
• designed to fit seamlessly into the automated build process for your Java projects
• allows full customization of the obfuscation process
• multiple entry points into your Java code are supported - allow access to as many applications, applets, JavaBeans and library interfaces as you require
• acts on Jar archives, the industry standard for packaging Java classes and their associated resources
• obfuscation is controlled by a flexible scripting language
• uses massive overloading of method and field names for even higher security
• generates only verifiable Java bytecode in full compliance with the Java Virtual Machine Specification
• updates the manifest file in the Jar archive, using obfuscated names and optionally generating MD5 and SHA-1 message digests