Software protection dongle vs. Adobe Air

Question

This looks like an extremely silly question even to me, but anyway, I'm curious:

Is there a way to protect an Adobe Air application with hardware key (aka Software Protection Dongle)?

I'm looking into developing a certain application that would require such key as a protection from being pirated (I can't change that fact), and it looks like that using Adobe Flash is the easiest way to write what this particular application should do.

Answer 1

If you are writing purely in Flash then you could use a product like SWF Studio (or Zinc ) which encrypts the flash file and produces and executable file. It needs to be encrypted because in a standard flash executable file the swf data can easily be extracted. Then you can protect this executable file using a Shell wrapper which ties it to a dongle. I did this using SWF Studio and Dinkey Dongles with my flash executable and it worked very well.

Links:

SWF Studio

Dinkey Dongles

Answer 2

AIR applications have no support for hardware dongles and don't even possess decent protection from decompiling. I imagine the dongle can be detected with some helper application called with NativeProcess, but this will require different helper for each OS. Also, without obfuscation all this will be pointless. See Trillix SWF Decompiler for decompilation and SecureSWF for obfuscation.