Defeating StrongName Protections

A strong name is made up of information used to identify an assembly and includes the assembly's text name, four-part version number, culture information (if provided), a public key, and a digital signature stored in the assembly's manifest that contains the assembly's metadata and is embedded in one of the files of the assembly.

By including a strong name in an assembly, the common language runtime (CLR) can be assured that two assemblies with the same strong name are indeed identical in all respects. In other words, strong names provide unique identification of an assembly to the CLR. In addition, adding a strong name ensures binary integrity by allowing the CLR to perform verification when the assembly is loaded to determine that it has not been tampered with since it was compiled.