Gareth Jones

Company: Kindisoft
Product: SecureSWF
Price: From $99

Kindisoft’s SecureSWF is the latest Flash obfuscator to go under the microscope (SWF Protector 2 and SWF Encrypt are reviewed elsewhere), so as the most expensive of the three (when considering the luxury versions), how does it stack up in terms of interface, functions, usability and stability?

Having downloaded the .zip file from the website, the first thing you notice is that there’s no installer. SecureSWF comes in a .zip file ready to extract and use without installation which has both pros and cons, though the benefits do outweigh the drawbacks. You can stick SecureSWF straight onto a USB drive like a portable app without worrying about whether or not it will run (assuming Java VM 1.5 is installed on the target machine), though if you believe in consistency you’ll have to manually stick the folder in your Program Files directory and create the relevant shortcuts in your Start Menu or favourite application launcher. As I said, the benefits do outweigh the drawbacks and I’m not suggesting that this is an issue – it’s just an observation.

So, after settling on where you’re going to run SecureSWF from, the next thing you notice after running the application is the number of options available. Compared to the other two solutions, there is a lot going on here (even the entry level SecureSWF has more options than both SWF Encrypt and SWC Encrypt combined), and it does seem a little daunting at first, but you quickly come to realise that it’s actually not that bad.

There are five tabs along the top – four of which contain settings and the last one is a status summary page. The fourth tab is just a rules page that overrides some of the options on the previous tabs, so in reality you have just three options tabs to familiarise yourself with rather than the initially anticipated five.

The first tab is the lightest on the options with just a SWF selection area, a list of presets to choose from and somewhere to specify the output location. You can select multiple files to import from the file browser (SWF, SWC and AIR formats – the others can only do SWF), though unfortunately there is no recursive import. There are five presets to choose from ranging from most- to least- aggressive, and a custom option should you want to tweak any of the presets yourself.

The second tab gets into more detail, allowing you to completely customise the level to which identifiers are renamed. Everything including local identifiers, labels, instance names, global variables and class members can be renamed to your exact requirements, and there’s even a tree structure that allows you to go in and select individual values. While this is great for offering the maximum level of obfuscation and the ability to make slight adjustments in the case of too many changes causing problems, I probably wouldn’t spend too much time here as it’s far easier to just let the presets take care of it all. Still, if I was in a situation where the maximum protection was available to me apart from one little identifier somewhere causing a problem, it’s nice to know that I can go in there and make the necessary change without having to sacrifice the security of the rest of the SWF.

The third tab offers code transformation, obfuscation, encrypted domain locking, SWF optimisation and literal strings encryption. The domain locking worked as expected, preventing my SWF from running anywhere other than this website and also from being run locally on my computer. Because I can only tell how well the other features are working by running them through a deobfuscator, I’m reserving those for another article that I’m working on which will be coming shortly.

Obfuscating a test SWF of 1,115kb, SecureSWF delivered a file of 1,156kb on maximum settings and 1,111kb on minimum settings – yes, it was actually smaller than the original. Obfuscation time was quick and on par with the others, and I experienced no crashes or freezes from the software no matter how hard I tried.

SecureSWF is a feature-packed obfuscator that not only works on Flash SWF files, but also SWC and AIR files as well. As the only obfuscator that works with these alternate file types, SecureSWF is really your only option when working with these formats. With regards to SWF files, the level of detail with which SecureSWF allows you to customise its obfuscation is significantly higher than that of SWF Protector 2, and an order of magnitude higher than that of SWF Encrypt.

One issue that always seems to come up in SecureSWF reviews is price. Yes, the fully-fledged bells-and-whistles version costs $400 which is significantly higher than either SWF Protector 2 or SWF Encrypt. However, the obfuscating methods, options and features available in this package – not to mention the fact that it will also protect your Flash components and AIR files – mean that you are getting a lot more here so naturally the cost is going to reflect that. I don’t really want to start comparing SecureSWF with its competitors here because this is supposed to be a review – not a comparison – but when one of the factors that could potentially put people off SecureSWF is its price when compared to its competitors, it’s difficult not to get sucked into such a comparison.

The bottom line is that SecureSWF starts at just $99, which is $151 less than SWF Encrypt and SWC Encrypt combined, but it offers more features than those two and does everything better. In light of that, even if price is an issue for you then SecureSWF blows SWF Encrypt out of the water having beaten it on options, features and price. Where things start to get interesting is when you compare SecureSWF to DComSoft’s $39.95 SWF Protector 2, but for that you’ll have to wait for my Versus feature which is coming soon.

In its own right, SecureSWF is a very impressive tool that is bursting with options and features. Due to the extreme levels of flexibility, it should be possible to tune every possible SWF file so that it’s protected as securely as possible without breaking any functionality. The fact that it allows obfuscation of everything from function names to labels and global variables to class members means that SWF files will be that much closer to being totally secure.

Out of 10, the usability and features on offer here have to command top marks, but I think the price of the professional edition could possibly push the application slightly out of reach for some lone developers. Yes, the Personal Lite Edition is only $99 but if you’re buying SecureSWF then you want the best version. Bearing the price of the professional edition in mind and the fact that a portion of its features are found in a product that only costs 1/10th as much, I’ve got to take a mark off. However, the wealth of additional options and features that you get for your money, their importance and the extra protection they bring to your work – plus the additional format support of course – mean that it’s just a single mark.

9/10

Coming soon: A review of how these SWF protectors stack up against SWF decryption tools.

• Current project: Catching up with reviews and compiling results for my comparisons.