Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations Chriss Miller on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
encrypt the folders in program files after installing vfp application
- Thread starter zhed0708
- Start date
Mike Lewis
Programmer
You don't need to do that. Once you have build the application into an executable, all the forms, etc. will be bound into the executable, and end-users won't be able to get at them.
But that doesn't apply to data. You normally want to allow your users to view and edit the data, so encryption isn't appropriate in that case.
Mike
__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Visual FoxPro articles, tips, training, consultancy
But that doesn't apply to data. You normally want to allow your users to view and edit the data, so encryption isn't appropriate in that case.
Mike
__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Visual FoxPro articles, tips, training, consultancy
Just a point of clarification.
Once you have built your Project into an EXE, your users no longer need to have the source files since they are running the EXE which will now internally contain the various components - less the data files.
So you can put your source files in a totally different location such as on your own workstation or somewhere that that the users have no access to and the EXE will not know the difference.
However if you were to leave the source files in a location that the users could access, building them into an EXE will not, by itself, prevent the users from getting to them.
Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr
Once you have built your Project into an EXE, your users no longer need to have the source files since they are running the EXE which will now internally contain the various components - less the data files.
So you can put your source files in a totally different location such as on your own workstation or somewhere that that the users have no access to and the EXE will not know the difference.
However if you were to leave the source files in a location that the users could access, building them into an EXE will not, by itself, prevent the users from getting to them.
Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr
- Thread starter
- #4
Olaf Doschke
Programmer
An exe can be decompiled, so the issue still exists, but if you want to encrypt something, you do so before deploying it, not afterwards.
There are some third party add ons to foxpro encrypting an EXE, of which the most famous would be ReFox and Konxise.
But one thing is for sure: The code is always encrypted in memory, as a CPU can't execute encrypted code. The normal user would not be able to profit from you prg, scx, frx and even less from the EXE, the biggest risc to your income/business from end users is illegal copies of your software, which ou can only prevent with hardware dongles, the app connecting with and checking against a license server or something along these lines, not with encryption.
The expert may still be able to recompile a fox app despite of it being encrpted, as you can eg simply enable hibernation in Windows and then examine the hiberfil.sys file, which is a memory dump and extract the unencrypted vfp exe from there.
Bye, Olaf.
There are some third party add ons to foxpro encrypting an EXE, of which the most famous would be ReFox and Konxise.
But one thing is for sure: The code is always encrypted in memory, as a CPU can't execute encrypted code. The normal user would not be able to profit from you prg, scx, frx and even less from the EXE, the biggest risc to your income/business from end users is illegal copies of your software, which ou can only prevent with hardware dongles, the app connecting with and checking against a license server or something along these lines, not with encryption.
The expert may still be able to recompile a fox app despite of it being encrpted, as you can eg simply enable hibernation in Windows and then examine the hiberfil.sys file, which is a memory dump and extract the unencrypted vfp exe from there.
Bye, Olaf.
Olaf Doschke
Programmer
Correction - of course I wanted to write: ...code is always decrypted in memory, as a CPU can't execute encrypted code...
- Status
