Solution Summery for Local/CD-Rom Flash Content Deal with Flash Player 8 Security Restriction

Flash Player 8 security restriction is a headache for developers, especially for these e-Learning courseware developers, because we need to develop Flash content playback locally or in a CD-Rom. Firstly, if you develop content with a Flash 8 exe projector, it does not have any restriction. However, we usually need to develop content running in browser and interact with JavaScript (e.g. calling AICC APIs), so Flash 8 security restriction must be a big challenge to developers. Although Macromedia has released many documentations: Macromedia Flash Player 8 Security White Paper (pdf), Macromedia Flash Player 8 Security-Related APIs White Paper (pdf) and Devnet article: Security Changes in Flash Player 8.

However, these documentations are too technical oriented, too many pages, too heavy and too hard for human to understand. The most important is no scenario usage example. I was easily falling asleep when reading them. Based on the basic principle I understand, Flash 8 restricted local SWF can either access Local-with-filesystem, Local-with-networking, Local-trusted.

I did the testing and summary here. I use Flash Player 8.0.22 and Flash Player 8.5 (alpha r133 & beta r212) to test. Suppose your main SWF is published in Flash 8 as Flash 8 SWF (local/network), Flash 7 SWF (local/network) and published in Flash MX 2004 as Flash 7 SWF. No Global Security Settings have made, just like a normal end-user machine config.

Conclusion From the table, you will see it is a sadly result that e-Learning developers cannot benefit with the new Flash 8 features if we publish the content in Flash 8 SWF, because we are highly relied on calling JavaScript and Internet data exchange. Unless we do the manually configuration on end-users’ machine, set up a local-trusted sandbox for our Flash content. What about CD-Rom distributed content? Need to do an installation first?