Applying Obfuscation by Itself

[Jesse]

Is it possible to only use Proguard for obfuscation? I want to avoid stripping any classes from my projects. My intention to use ProGuard is only for obfuscation so as to prevent reverse engineering.

[tim.vdbroecke]

That’s definitely possible! At its core, ProGuard is split into three distinct processing phases that can be toggled on/off separately:

• Shrinking, can be disabled by adding the rule -dontshrink
• Optimization, can be disabled by adding the rule -dontoptimize
• Obfuscation, can be disabled by adding the rule -dontobfuscate

The short answer for you is to add these rules to your PG config:

-dontshrink
-dontoptimize

But if you want to get the most obfuscation possible, make sure to consider this post that discusses the added value of optimization from a security perspective:

When is Optimization a Security Feature?

It is an axiom of the SW Security field that “Security comes at a Cost.” That cost is usually in the form of larger and slower applications; if stronger protections are desired, you can expect a potentially dramatic hit on your application size and responsiveness. However, there is a class of protection techniques that actually improve size and performance because they are fundamentally optimizations. My background is in compilers; I spent part of my career building compiler back-ends (the cod…

and see if you maybe want to enable optimization after all