ADOBE® FLEX® 3: PROGRAMMING ACTIONSCRIPT™ 3.0

ADOBE FLEX 3

Developer Guide

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Other forms of loaded data include text or XML files, which are loaded with a URLLoader object. Again in this case,

to access any data from another security sandbox, permission must be granted by means of a cross-domain policy

file at the origin domain. For details, see “Using URLLoader and URLStream” on page 555.

Overview of permission controls

The Flash Player client run-time security model has been designed around resources, which are objects such as SWF

files, local data, and Internet URLs. Stakeholders are the parties who own or use those resources. Stakeholders can

exercise controls (security settings) over their own resources, and each resource has four stakeholders. Flash Player

strictly enforces a hierarchy of authority for these controls, as the following illustration shows:

Hierarchy of security controls

This means, for instance, that if an administrator restricts access to a resource, no other stakeholders can override

that restriction.

Administrator, user, and website controls are detailed in the following sections. Author (developer) settings are

described in the rest of this chapter.

Administrative user controls

An administrative user of a computer (a user who has logged in with administrative rights) can apply Flash Player

security settings that affect all users of the computer. In a nonenterprise environment, such as on a home computer,

there is usually one user who also has administrative access. Even in an enterprise environment, individual users may

have administrative rights to the computer.

There are two types of administrative user controls:

• The mms.cfg file

• The Global Flash Player Trust directory

The mms.cfg file

On Mac OS X systems, the mms.cfg file is located at /Library/Application Support/Macromedia/mms.cfg. On

Microsoft Windows systems, the file is located in the Macromedia Flash Player folder in the system directory (for

example, C:\windows\system32\macromed\flash\mms.cfg on a default Windows XP or Windows Vista instal-

lation).

When Flash Player starts, it reads its security settings from this file, and uses them to limit functionality.

Administrator

(User Institution)

settings

User settings

Website settings

Author settings