Encrypting Output Files?

[lostron]

Hi. I have a simple program that has a lot of movie files and images and other files. I have tried to make a simple installer and the output files were the same structure as the ones I put into the program. This worries me a little because the files are vulnerable to reverse engineering, etc. Is these an option were installshield can encrypt the output files in a way so they do not appear in the same structure?

Thanks

[Cary_R]

This is certainly possible.

What it sounds like you're seeing is that you're building an Uncompressed image. I would check out the various options available in the Editor's Release wizard (Installation Designer -> Media -> Releases -> right click on release option -> Release Wizard) to see what other options are available.

Using Windows Installer, it's almost impossible to completely avoid people reverse engineering things like you're concerned about, since Windows Installer is an open format by design.

Best way to handle this would be to create a single compressed Setup.exe for your install--there's a few layers of reverse engineering involved to get at the files in the installation image (getting the MSI from setup.exe, getting the files from the *.msi, etc.).

[lostron]

Hi,
I have tried that but after installing the program, the structure is the same as in the program. Is there anyway to encrpyt the files of the program, maybe into DAT files or other transparent files?

Thanks

[Cary_R]

I see what you're talking about--encrypting the files so that after laying them down on the system, they're encrypted.

Unfortunately, this would be a custom sort of thing, and I'm not sure if there would be a method of making this work transparently, since there's typically only so much control you have over the behavior of an application.

[Christopher_Pai]

Since this is the AdminStudio forum I assume you are repackaging a third party app.

Perhaps packaging the application as a Citrix Virtual profile would provide some obsecurity to the internal resources.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/installsite/archive/2007/07/10/1013648.aspx

Otherwise you could encrypt all the files and package it up, but your application displaying the files would have to decrypt on the fily. Assuming you had access to the source code to do this, I think there would be a pretty substantial performance hit.