opener

protect / extract swf <quote> My boss, worry wart that he is, is worried that even though I protect my director movies, that someone can technically crack into them and retrieve graphics, especially flash animations, and use them for their own purposes. Does anyone know of any way of further "Protecting" your flash animations within director? (This is mainly for cdrom projects.) </quote> Compressing the files to dcr/cct seems to help (You can use them with CD-projects as well). On another list I found this info by the author of a flash decompiler: <quote> "A SWF in a DCR is safe from Action Script Viewer, compressing it first won't make it any more secure. (On the other hand a SWF, whether compressed or not, in a DIR or DXR file is not safe from ASV). There are ways to get your assets in Director movies. I haven't checked if it works for SWFs (or they have an MX version out yet) but I'd rather try DirOpener at http://www.j-roen.net/diropener before a conclusion. On the other hand, handing client a DCR seems it would make stealing hard enough, especially if they know about Flash but not Director. Best regards, Burak KALAYCI" </quote> In the direct-l - archives you may find some discussions how to protect your files against spying, basically you would at least need something in startmovie to detect if the file is running as a miaw and commit suicide (erase all members) if so. Compared to flash and java applets (which are open like a tennis court) dxr/dcr files are safer but it always depends on the means someone is willing to put into it: if time/money don't count, a dcr un-compressor and a dxr decompiler could be written. And I don't believe that doing it all in C or any other language would help - computers are machines which copy and move data. best regards Daniel Plaenitz <quote> What about programs like "Roboflash protector"? Do you think they actually work and are worth the cost? </quote> It's an arms race. It may work for a while until one of the other tool developers decides its worth the time to add a countermeasure to his un-protector. .swf is a documented file format (unlike .dcr) so there is no real barrier. (Said protector is sold by a company that also has an extractor among their products. They fight on both sides of the front.) I think your best chance might be to directly optimize / obfuscate the bytecode using http://flasm.sourceforge.net/. However, the very same tool can be used to undo it... http://www.buraks.com/ http://www.ehelp.com/products/roboflash/extractor/ http://www.livetronix.com/products/swfscanner/index.php http://flasm.sourceforge.net/ http://buraks.com/swifty/xenap14.zip http://www.j-roen.net/diropener/download/files/dirOpener300-850-1-PC.zip