保护数据免于从setup.exe或jar中提取

Question

I am making the setup of java swing application by using Inno Setup as an exe i am selecting the jar file of my project, I am also adding other necessary resources as folder.

When I am installing the setup on the client side. it is putting the jar and other resources in program files folder but there client can extract the my java classes and other resources from jar. I want that client can only use the resources by application program but he could not extract the resources. How is it possible?

Answer 1

There is literally nothing you can do to entirely prevent someone from extracting the resources.

The best you can do is to make the process a bit difficult; eg by storing the resources in the JAR file in encrypted form. The problem is that your program would need to decrypt the resources in order to use them. Someone with sufficient skills and patience can reverse engineer your decryption code and capture the unencrypted resources.

By the way, this is not a Java-specific problem. Any application that you provide to a user as an executable can be reverse engineered ... assuming that the user has the wherewithal to run it in the first place.

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The bottom line is that if you are not prepared for the possibility that someone might extract the resources, you should not distribute the executable.