protecting adobe air apps

Question

I am about to deliver an Adobe AIR app to a customer. But it's my first delivery of any sort, I.e. I have no experience whatsoever with licensing etc.

Users of this app may or may not be online, so can't count on that. In fact it's 99% sure that they will be offline.

Nor do I expect them to very tech-savvy, who will spend enough time scouting for ways to "crack" it.

So, is there an okeish type of way to protect this app. That is, I don't want people to simply copy the installation folder, take it to another machine and run it. It should be slightly harder than this.

Oh, and I am also using PHP and MySql, with which this AIR app communicates. So anything you guys could help me with is very very welcome.

Answer 1

protect the php api and not the frontend app. have a license key which is bound to an ip address and authenticate the request (which contains the key) is coming from the correct ip.

Answer 2

If you want to protect your Flex app you can use irrObfuscator. There is a 30 days free demo.

If you wish to obfuscate your PHP code I would suggest ioncube. There is an online obfuscator that you can pay per à-la-carte. Pretty usefull. Tho you need ioncube loaders which is a set of PHP extension that you will find into the products section. Not sure but I think you can install loaders without playing with PHP config so it's shared-hosting friendly.