How do i know if the request came from flash swf?

Question

I have an application developed in flash, and I need to access some php files. so the php file return some data if the access is came from swf. How can i identify if the request came from flash or not?

without passing get/post variables to php.

Answer 1

User agent/Referer possibly. Keep in mind that requests can easily be forged

Answer 2

I don't think there really is a reliable way of detecting whether Flash made the request. Flash doesn't allow you to set the user-agent, and there are a lot of restrictions on what headers can be set.

Take a look at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AS3LCR/Flash_10.0/flash/net/URLRequestHeader.html

as John Ballinger suggested, you could set your own header using this and look for that header in the PHP page.