We here at Squidder often work on sites that tease new information and images through a cool flash interface. You know: you’ve got to unlock x by doing y and then you get rewards z.

One of the biggest challenges we run into when doing those sites is how to keep people from getting that information before we’re ready for them to. Sure we could just load all that junk into swfs and hope that people don’t decompile it. But that’s runs counter to how we usually like to develop things: lots of little, external files, loaded on demand.

But of course, that presents it’s own problem: You, the clever public, can just look in your activity monitor and access the files directly without jumping through all of our cool little hoops.

The solution: ncrypt our external assets and then decrypting them after we’ve loaded the byte data into the flash. Well, that’s easy enough to write a encrypt/decrypted tool using something like as3crypto. But we here at the big S like to be a little lazier. We don’t want to have to decrypt our xml files (or our images, for that matter) to edit and them and then reencrypt them when we’re finished. We’d just rather make the changes and have the encryption only appear on demand when you’re accessing the file from a web browser…

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