Re: FN-FORUM: Preventing saving of swf files

date posted 30th January 2007 16:56


> What I need to do is embed a flash file on a website,
> but make it impossible or at least very difficult for
> someone to then save the file to disk and use later.

your best bet here is not think of 'hiding or protecting' the SWF itself, as
that will always be 'circumventable', but to make the SWF aware of its own
context, and only 'play' if certain criteria are met.

e.g. have a 'stub' or 'container' SWF which simply contains a script to
check if it's running from a particular domain, if it is, then load in your
actual content SWF, otherwise return an error. (ideally, in this scenario,
the content SWF should *also* check that it is running from within the stub
movie and/or domain.)

if you wanted to go a step further, you could make the stub SWF in the
example above time sensitive, or even generate it 'on the fly'
to stop people from reverse engineering it. however, this is getting into
heavy server application territory...