Bug report with gideros_2013.09-p1: "Encrypting all assets" has unforeseen consequences

Comments

• SinisterSoft Maintainer

  October 2013

  +1 on this. Maybe we could start or end the filename of images, sound files, etc that we want encrypted with a special tag. eg: an underscore or something?

  Coder, video game industry veteran (since the '80s, ❤'s assembler), arrested - never convicted hacker (in the '90s), dad of five, he/him (if that even matters!).
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• ianchia Member

  October 2013

  I like @SinisterSoft 's idea. That way we can still encrypt assets when we want to while keeping others encryption free. @atilim @ar2rsawseen @deniz … your thoughts?

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• keszegh Member

  October 2013 edited October 2013

  perhaps we should be able to tag 'to encrypt' in the ide (and in the project file) all the files we want to encrypt, i think this would be better than special endings etc.
  although i don't need encryption, just wanted to mention that special endings and so seem to be a bad solution.

  Likes: OZApps

  Longtitle Productions, creator of
  Fragmenter - animated loop machine and IKONOMIKON - the memory game

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• OZApps Guru

  October 2013

  Agree with @keszegh, tagging a file would be better, sometimes I use an _ in the filename and if that would mean encrypt, that could lead to some unpleasant situations.
  
  This is a rather tricky situation...

  twitter: @ozapps | http://www.oz-apps.com | http://howto.oz-apps.com | http://reviewme.oz-apps.com
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• ar2rsawseen Maintainer

  October 2013

  It's indeed tricky, better remove encryption support completely
  
  Probably marking files in gproj xml file would be the correct solution, but separating lua and asset encryption checkboxes could be much faster one
  
  We will discuss it internally more

  http://appcodingeasy.com/Gideros-Mobile

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• ianchia Member

  October 2013

  @ar2rsawseen @atilim For the sake of expedience, I'd vote for my original suggestion of having separate Lua and asset encryption checkboxes, since it would be very helpful to have a new point release of 2013.09 with all the associated bug fixes without having to wait for Gideros 2.0.
  
  I can still manually copy my assets over that don't need encryption if I need a mix of encrypted and non-encrypted assets. For a bigger release, I'll leave it up to your collective expertise. (-:
  
  Best,
  
  - Ian

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• OZApps Guru

  October 2013

  @ar2rsawseen, how about adding a new API, decryptAsset(filename, salt), so the developer can decrypt the assets themselves rather than automatically and also offer a encryptAsset(filename) to encrypt. It would fit more so in line with the article I wrote on http://howto.oz-apps.com about unlimited stuff without buying from the store.

  twitter: @ozapps | http://www.oz-apps.com | http://howto.oz-apps.com | http://reviewme.oz-apps.com
  Author of Learn Lua for iOS Game Development from Apress ( http://www.apress.com/9781430246626 )
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• ar2rsawseen Maintainer

  October 2013

  @OZApps you mean like encrypt/decrypt from lua? Wouldn't it then arise a chicken and egg problem, is the salt to decrypt code is encrypted in the code?

  http://appcodingeasy.com/Gideros-Mobile

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• ianchia Member

  October 2013

  I don't think decrypting a file using a Gideros native function is a good idea unless we're decrypting them into RAM and not onto the drive. Otherwise, it'll be very flash drive intensive and slow apps down that have a great number of assets or large assets.
  
  - Ian

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• OZApps Guru

  October 2013

  @ar2rsawseen, I am not sure about your question.
  
  The Encrypt/Decrypt would be an additional API available to LUA in Gideros. The reason for this is not just encrypting the source alone (I think this is where you are stating the chicken-egg issue) in fact this could be used for things like
  1. High Score tables that are otherwise plain text files
  2. In-App/store purchases that need to be written somewhere to indicate as purchased
  
  it can even be used further to incorporate @ianchia's suggestion, the API can be

  loadAsset(filename, [salt])

  and this would return the asset loaded in memory and the salt is used if it is encrypted.
  
  So if the users are rendering the textures to disk, they can be encrypted and saved rather than simple bitmap dumps.
  
  And to your second question, salt could be the password or whatever, but IF there is a standard salt used in Gideros, then any and every file that is encrypted can be decrypted as the standard salt is used. So yes there are several ways to pass this salt in the code which itself would be encrypted. We are talking about two levels of encryption here,
  
  1. The standard Gideros encryption that encrypts the lua bytecode
  2. The asset encrption that is handled by the user for files that are not in the RESOURCE folder of the app and are in Documents or tmp etc.

  twitter: @ozapps | http://www.oz-apps.com | http://howto.oz-apps.com | http://reviewme.oz-apps.com
  Author of Learn Lua for iOS Game Development from Apress ( http://www.apress.com/9781430246626 )
  Cool Vizify Profile at https://www.vizify.com/oz-apps

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• Pyros_Studio Member

  October 2013

  Hello
  It's very limiting and ineficient to work only with the file system. With the option to load also resources from memory it would be possible to make your own decryption algorithms, make textures and sounds in real-time....
  Something like in this thread:
  http://www.giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/1102/loading-images-from-memory

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