Protecting stacks

[Peter Bogdanoff]

Thanks Mark. I will mull over this...

On Nov 02, 2012, at 05:19 PM, Mark Schonewille <m.schonewille at economy-x-talk.com> wrote:

Hi Peter,

You can protect stacks with a password, as Ralph suggested.

Basically you can't prevent anyone from opening your stack in the IDE and copying all the text, if your stack isn't part of a standalone, and even if it is part of a standalone it isn't too difficult to detach the stack and save it as a stackfile again. 

There are also ways to open an additional stack in a standalone and run a script in that stack to copy all the text and image objects from your stack, even if it is password protected. Such a script could also save stacks and substacks as separate files. Only the scripts are effectively protected.

A solution might be to save all your stackfiles as encrypted files. A script in your standalone would read the files, decrypt them and open them in a new window, similar to

put url "binfile:path/to/file.bin" into myStack
decrypt myStack using "blowfish" with myKey
go myStack in new window

The encypted files can be opened in a text editor, but will be useless. Because the key in your script is protected by the password of your mainstack, this approach is relatively save. Still, a hacker will always find a way to get the data out of your stack.

I just read Stephen's e-mail, while writing the above. I think his idea is relatively insecure, because you can still open the stack in the IDE and run the decryption routines, although you could add a line to the script, which exits if the stack has been opened in the IDE:

if the environment contains "dev" then exit to top

Perhaps the safest way would be using pictures instead of text. Btw make sure to set the lockText of your fields to true (but you know that, I'm sure).

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
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On 3 nov 2012, at 00:49, Peter Bogdanoff wrote:

> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm needing to protect both the scripts and the text in fields for a project that is essentially a book--many pages with text. The author of the book is, well very concerned about piracy.
> 
> I see that in the Standalone Application Settings I can protect scripts of stack files in the application. However, I have stack files that are NOT in the application--the app just serves to launch files. How do I protect the scripts in those files?
> 
> And generally, how would I stop someone from opening stack files in their version of the IDE and having their way with my text? Or, just opening the files with a text editor?
> 
> I can image when the files launch in the LiveCode IDE, a password is asked, and a global is set to allow authoring. But what about when it's opened as a raw text file?
> 
> Peter Bogdanoff
> UCLA



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