Protect Vb programs from decompile/hacking

does any one know a way to protect your VB programs (vb5) from being decompiled and/or hacked?

Cause when i make programs all you have to do is change it to a .txt file and you can read most anything of it.

Any way to really Protect it good?

Are you sure that's AFTER you've compiled it? I've never come across an executable file which was legible when you open it in a text editor. It should become binary when you compile it (I think), and be meaningless to a text editor.

If you mean your source code, then just don't give it away :)

Yes this also a first for me. I have tried many times to do so but very little in the file can be read.

But yes there are decompliers to be found on the web but how to protect against them, I have no idea.


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Maartin
[email protected]
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As far as I know nobody has yet made a decompiler for VB4 or above, so you should be safe there (for the time being, anyway).

There is a guy in German that made a decompiler for VB4, he will decompile any VB4 exe for you to source code at a charge.

Microsoft naturally denied all of it and said it is not possible. But he provided us with proof. We lost a lot of source code due to a burglary the only thing his charge was so great that we decided just to recode the lot.

But after that I heard of not higher decompiler as yet.

Information like sounds, cursors, pictures etc stored in a resource file (*.res) can be viewed after compiling (in a program like Visual C++), but I've never been able to decompile any further...(not that I'm trying too hard!!)

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Matthew Ralston
E-Mail: [email protected]
Web Sites:My Home Page

Sorry about my English, but my Scouse is dead good!

Ther are programs that decompile the forms, and grab recourses from the recourse file. Also if you open a vb exe in notepad you can read the hardcoded strings that are in it, so never use something like sPass = "PASSWORD = HENK". There are some anti decompile programs out there that scramble some of the contents, also there are some programs that make exe's smaller, optimize them, this also makes it harder to decompile because the contents get scrambeld(like eggs :) ).

You could search for some of these programs on the net, there are a few of them out there.



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Vincent van den Braken
EMail: [email protected]
ICQ: 15440110
Homepage: http://www.azzmodan.demon.nl

I mean when you go to FILE -> Make Exe
After it makes it, you can change it to a txt file and read it.

Or do you guys mean compile as in Making an install file.?

Erm.......... Maybe it's just some freaky coincidence that the binary works out as ascii codes that make sense? No? Thought not.

I have no idea why that would happen, unless you mean like Azzmodan said, where you can read the hard-coded strings involved. It should be more or less just low level instructions if I remember the theory of what a compiler does. I have done what you said (ie. viewed an EXE file in a text editor) a few times before, and there's just meaningless characters, usually those little box symbols that mean there's no character to go with the ASCII code.

Have you tried this with any other EXEs? Id this normal? Am I just some rambling nutter polluting this forum with my insanity? :D

For all I know every executable can be "decompiled" to assembler instructions so I guess there's no way to totally secure the code.