Archive for the “.NET” Category

This article describes how you can use SWF files as widgets in BEML that have been protected by utilities that prevent decompilation. Before we start, just a couple of things I’d like to point out:

• This article is NOT a review of the effectiveness of SWF Protection tools, there are plenty of (endless) discussions on that topic on specialized forums.
• This approach is NOT my recommended one for creating User Generated Content upload widgets. I still believe using a secured mid-tier upload server is a better model. Event with a protected SWF, a proxy tool like Charles or WireShark will give a hacker all the information he needs to get your token if you do not protect your sensitive Widget/Server communications.

Why would you do this?

The short answer is that the SWF format is a pseudo-compiled, documented file format. This implies that it is relatively easy to reverse engineer a SWF file. Just Google “swf decompilers” and look at the results. There are literally dozens of tools that allow anyone to retrieve the complete source code of a SWF. Regarding BEML Widgets, this may pose some security threats if for example you want to:

• Create a video upload widget that uploads straight into your Brightcove account. Again, SWF protection by itself is NOT the approach I would recommend, as this requires including/sending a Write Token to use the Media API in your SWF.
• Create a widget that interfaces with your backend and that contains configuration information you want to give some level of protection
• Create a widget that represents a considerable investment or effort, and by consequence you want to protect from being duplicated

to name but a few.

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I’ve just created a Google Code project for Tanaris, a .NET software development kit (SDK) for the Brightcove 3 application programming interface (API) implemented in C#.

Currently the SDK supports all of the video and playlist read methods, write is being implemented. All returned DTO (Data Transfer Objects) are strong typed and (if required) converted to native .NET formats (like DateTime). This SDK uses the NewtonSoft JSON library for .NET.
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This article describes how to access the Brightcove 3 Media API using C# .NET 3.5. Usage of another .NET programming language can be extrapolated by principle. I will update this article when I have transcoded the entire Media API.
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This is intended to be a small free tool to make the process of contributing & validating translation files as easy as possible. Click here for installer (Windows XP/Vista). If you don’t have .NET 3.5 installed, it will install this automatically, but this may take a few minutes.

Version 0.1.0:

Translation template file is not yet implemented because I don’t have the master template here, so “New File” will display an error message. Load an example file instead.

• First edition, for internal review. Basic functionality implemented
• Auto-Install & Update checking
• I don’t have the master file so I took this one off a French translation file that was sent to me. Needs to be replaced by the English master file.
• Loads and Saves edited files, will ask confirmation on overwrite
• Built-in Browser preview for conformity checking.
• Malformed XML files will be rejected during load.
• Transcoding of special characters is done in background
• Sorting of columns possible by clicking on header
• Newline in text messages: use \n