Re: AppleScript feature request - encryption
Re: AppleScript feature request - encryption
- Subject: Re: AppleScript feature request - encryption
- From: Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:03:40 -0800
On Mar 15, 2005, at 10:22 AM, Martin Orpen wrote:
on 15/3/05 4:54 pm, Christopher Nebel at email@hidden wrote:
There are, of course, various ways to obscure the intent of code from
prying eyes, but doing anything truly secure is very hard. At some
point, you have to ask what it is that you're trying to hide and why
you care.
The scripts are being bundled with an existing app and being sold at a
premium. If other people get hold of the scripts then they get the
premium
product at the same price as the vanilla version.
The product has its own scripting language but requires some tasks to
be
accomplished using AS. Another developer has come up with a method of
encrypting and securing the native scripts so that they can't be
accessed -
which has left the AS scripts as the only part of the product that is
open
to this sort of scrutiny.
I presume I can get around this by doing something along the lines of:
<http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1026.html>
It sounds like your concern is more piracy -- that is, people copying
the scripts -- than it is people understanding their contents. If a
mere copy will cause you grief, then encryption will not help; you need
to obscure/secure their location. You could obscure the location by
storing the script in something that's not a normal script file; this
will require writing something along the lines of the code in QA1026.
Securing the location is harder; you'd have to encrypt the file in some
way that a copy somewhere else wouldn't work, say by encrypting with
the user's name on install.
Alternatively, if you could get support from the host application, then
the application could know somehow whether it's vanilla or premium, and
behave accordingly. An application I used to work on did this. One
way is to simply have two different versions of the application. Some
people arrange the same thing with one version by requiring a serial
number to use the program and then having the capabilities encoded in
the number.
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
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