Hiding (or encrypting) app resources?

Question

I\'ve developing a Cocoa app that has certain resources (images) which I wish to protect, but still display. Normally one would just place these in the resources folder, bu

Answer 1

In order for you to protect the images in one big file, you can just dump the image data to a NSData object sequentially.

If you want, you can use either salts, as previously mentioned, or you can use AES encryption method, as shown here.

Then, you will have to either save the image files structurally (using an NSArray or similar) or record the image offsets so you can retrieve the image data blocks correctly.

This has some drawbacks, specially if your images change over time. That way you will have to monitor those changes and re-structure the file accordingly.

On other option is for you to simply mask the image files by changing name/extension to one of your choice. This will leave some users away from touch.

Finally, you can search for some archiving frameworks using zip like functions and keep the images there (as Blizzard uses in their MPQ format). This will be the best option (since it provides you with encryption methods and it abstracts you of the mechanisms of encryption and archiving) but it may not be easy to find such a framework.