Protect a Web Application or Service (.war)

The PreEmptive Protection™ DashO™ Project Wizard creates a project that protects Java web applications and services packaged as .war files. The wizard examines your .war file, detects its classes and dependencies, and generates an Ant script that extracts the file, obfuscates it, and reassembles it for you.

Create a Web Project with the Project Wizard

1. Go to File > Project Wizard.
2. Select the Web application type.
3. Enter the location and name of your .war file.
4. Enter the location of the JDK that DashO uses to resolve Java runtime classes. DashO examines the .war file for classes and jars that are included. These items include the special locations in WEB-INF that are used by the web container as well as jars that may be referenced by JNLP files.
   
5. Add any shared classes your web container provides to the list of support JARs, such as the log4j logging service.
6. Add Java modules (.jmod) to the list of support libraries.

7. Select the Generate Entry Point rules based on Hibernate annotations option to set the following rules: 

   Applies To	Rule
   Classes annotated with javax.persistence.Entity	DashO doesn't rename or remove the class.
   Members of classes annotated with javax.persistence.Entity or javax.persistence.Embedded	DashO doesn't remove: Fields Getters (0-parameter methods with names that begin with get or is) Setters (1-parameter methods with names that begin with set)

8. Review the suggested annotation-based entry point rules. Enable a rule only if you're familiar with the annotation and want to preserve the code elements it decorates.
   

9. Choose the directory where you want to save the wizard's output. The wizard creates a project file, obfuscate.xml, and obfuscate.properties. 

   

Warning: If the directory already contains project files with the same names, DashO asks whether you want to replace the project. If you replace it, DashO saves your new settings and creates a backup of the old project.

Obfuscate Your WAR File

1. (Optional) Edit obfuscate.properties to change location defaults.

2. Run obfuscate.xml with Ant.You can do this from the command line:

   ant -f obfuscate.xml

   Or call it from another Ant file:

   <ant antfile="obfuscate.xml"/>

3. Find your protected file in the output location. Its name matches your original .war file with _dashoed appended.
4. Deploy and test the protected .war file.

What the Ant Script Does

When you run obfuscate.xml, it performs the following tasks in order:

1. Extracts the .war file into a directory. The default directory is .unwar.
2. Runs the wizard-generated project file against the contents of the .unwar directory, and stores the results temporarily in the .obfus directory.
3. Reassembles the .war file with the obfuscated code in a new file with _dashoed appended to the name.

Limitations and Troubleshooting