I was approached by DComSoft to review their product, SWF Protector. They also offered to provide 3 free licenses for a giveaway. More on that below.

SWF Protector alters your SWF files so that it is more difficult to decompile them. This makes it more difficult for others to reverse engineer parts of your product that you’d like to remain secret. As has been noted on several other sites, there is no 100% sure method to protect your Flash content, but there are ways to make it more difficult. If someone is intent on breaking into your files, and they’re smart enough, they will find away. The usefulness in SWF encryption and obfuscation products is largely to reduce the number of people who can decompile your code by making decompilation more difficult.

That said, here are the criteria I used to review SWF Protector:

1. Usability: how easy is it to operate the application?
2. Is the SWF still fully-functional after protection? (You’d be surprised how many tools make the SWF inoperable).
3. Can the SWF be decompiled using readily available tools?
4. Bonus points for useful advanced features.

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