Getting Started

Since dProtect is based on Proguard, it relies on the same integration mechanism.

In particular, there is this official documentation on the Guardsquare’s website: ProGuard manual: Quick Start

Compared to the Proguard integration, there are a few differences for using dProtect in your project.

Android Gradle project

Within an Android Gradle project, one can integrate dProtect by first adding the Github’s Maven repository associated to dProtect:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
        maven {
          url = uri("https://maven.pkg.github.com/open-obfuscator/dProtect")
        }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath 're.obfuscator:dprotect-gradle:1.0.0'
    }
}

Even if the packages are public, you need to generate a github token to access GitHub Maven Packages:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
        maven {
          url = uri("https://maven.pkg.github.com/open-obfuscator/dProtect")
          credentials {
              username = "your-username"
              password = "the-token"
          }
        }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath 're.obfuscator:dprotect-gradle:1.0.0'
    }
}

The generated token must have the repo scope enabled. You can also look at the GitHub documentation for the details: Using a published package.

Then, in the build.gradle of the application, we can instantiate the Gradle plugin and define the dProtect configuration block:

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'
apply plugin: 're.obfuscator.dprotect'

android {
  compileSdkVersion 30
  buildTypes {
    release {
        minifyEnabled false // Prevent using r8
    }
    debug {
        minifyEnabled false // Prevent using r8
    }
}

dProtect {
    configurations {
      release {
          defaultConfiguration 'proguard-android-optimize.txt'
          defaultConfiguration 'proguard-android.txt'
          configuration        'proguard-rules.pro'
          configuration        'dprotect-rules.pro'
      }
      debug {
          defaultConfiguration 'proguard-android.txt'
          configuration        'proguard-rules.pro'
      }
    }
}

The dProtect configuration block is exactly the same as the proguard{...} block. This block has been renamed from proguard to dProtect to avoid conflicts and errors.

The *.pro files referenced in the configuration block follow the same syntax as Proguard and we can transparently use the original Proguard files since dProtect is – first and foremost – an extension of Proguard.

Standalone

dProtect comes also as a standalone package that can be used independently of Android, Gradle, and its plugin. Typically, we can run dProtect on a .jar archive as follows:

$ dprotect.sh                     \
  -injars ./my-sdk.jar            \
  -outjar ./my-obfuscated-sdk.jar \
  @./rules/dprotect.pro

This standalone run can be useful to protect a third-party SDK for which we only have the .aar/.jar archive.

Indeed, since dProtect/ProGuard are working on the Java bytecode to obfuscate and optimize the code, we don’t need the original source code of the archive to apply an obfuscation scheme.