Gareth Jones

Due to the unsecure nature of Flash, I’ve always been wary of having my work decompiled and its code re-used without my knowledge or consent. By default Flash offers very poor protection against this. While it’s undoubtedly impossible to prevent this from happening completely (despite various security software vendors’ claims), you can make the process so difficult that most people will give up trying.

Of course, not all Flash work will be a target to such piracy but games and elearning products can be targets because the cost and time of developing these resources legitimately can be quite high.

An easy way to protect your work against decompiling is to run your work through an obfuscator. I use Amayeta’s SWF Encrypt, and while a file that has been obfuscated in this way is larger in terms of file-size, the protection that this process offers your code is well worth it. Obfuscating your file like this makes the code almost impossible for a human reader to know what’s going on inside it, much less be able to steal it or change it for their own needs. In a decompiler the code will appear to be nothing more than a load of gibberish, and in fact some decompilers will be tripped up by the obfuscated file and won’t even open it at all.