Very Scary! 1

[Oppenhiemer]

Hi -

While recently having problems with a corrupt .dfm file (problems solved now) I started searching for utilities to help repair dfm files. In my search I came across a very interesting/scarey utility that can actually Deconstruct/De-compile an exe file created with delphi back to its source files.

In effect - anyone can decompile a program you have written using delphi and extract the source code, forms - you name it! Which effectively means that none of our applications are secure!!

Here is the link :

http://www.bykeyword.com/pages/detail5/download-5542.html

I was in 2 minds about posting the link, but would like some comments as to what to make of it. O well.. maybe go back to developing MDE files in Access - least that seemed more secure .

Opp.

 

[delphiman]

Mate!
If anyone can make any sense of my spider-web coding they are welcome!! LOL

 

[Oppenhiemer]

hehe.. you use that technique too! Thought it was just me.

Still shocked at how freakishly good that program was (and Im sure there are many others out there.) Maybe throw a few supporting DLL's (boo hiss I know)in with my code.

Opp.

 

[Svanhooft]

hi,

Downloaded the program and started it to decompile one of mine major projects. There is not much to worry about. The program is a form extracter. It extracts the forms, all the coding isn't decompiled. So when you decompile you will see the form and every thing om it. But the code behind the form, by example the code in a button click isn't decompiled. There is another issue when you open a decompiled form and you donn't have the components installed, the form will open with an error. So you will need the components the programmer uses. When the program creates the components in the creation of the form there is nothing to see and nothing to compile. All units without a form aren't decompiled, so nothing to see, nothing to use.

Conclusion: A nice tool if you want to decompile your own projects because you lost some forms. If you use al lot of code it doesn't give you a clue.

Steph [Bigglasses]

 

[michaenh]

Hi guys...

Really interesting... I had just download the program.

cheers,
mha

 

[Oppenhiemer]

Your right Steph...Phew! Dont know what I was looking at before . I could have swore it extracted all code as well. Was about to invest in some protection software too

Thanks for your feedback all.. my mistake(guess paranoia got the better of me .)

Cheers..

Opp.

 

[earlrainer]

Read a long time back ,that all Delphi programs that have been built fully optimized, cannot be decompiled to the original source. If you have, however, a debug version of the program (with profile info and the like), then most debugger applications will let you view the source code of the application

 

[DelphiAaron]

Shrinker, from Blinkinc., will take a 16- or 32-bits Windows executable (that means .EXE, .DLL, .DRV or .OCX, but also Delphi 3 .DPL packages) or a real-mode DOS executable, and transparently compresses it.

Shrinking an executable will compress and thereby encrypt the contents, so any string value will be unreadable. And since there's no "unshrink" option, we'd give hackers a real hard time here...

http://www.drbob42.com/reviews/tools/shrink.htm

Aaron Taylor
John Mutch Electronics

http://www.jme.com.au

 

[Griffyn]

Hi Aaron,

A question for you: How can the program be executed if there's no unshrink option? The program has to unencrypt and unshrink it's contents at some point.

 

[Svanhooft]

hi,

I have the shrink program but not all the shrinked programs will run after they have been shrinked. Due to so components we use it is not always possible to use this program.

Steph [Bigglasses]

 

[DelphiAaron]

griffyn
the program unshrinks in memory...

Aaron Taylor
John Mutch Electronics

http://www.jme.com.au