Create a "virtual" file and execute it

My google search has led me to here: How to create a virtual file? In that article, people suggested the author to extract the file to a temp directory and work with it from there.

Actually, what I would like to do, is something similar to what the author was originally asking - create a "virtual" file and assign a "path" to it, such that would be understandable by other applications calling standard windows filesystem API. Th开发者_JAVA百科e purpose of this is to prevent copying and unauthorized use.

A concept of what I would like to do:

In our company, we have developed a program - but it's not a standard EXE application, it has an internal format (let's assume the 'application' format's extension is .MDL) and is executed by runtime environment, so the runtime must be installed on the client machine. This concept is similar to Java (although this is not java; just comparing, so that you can better understand). What I want to do now, is to encrypt this .MDL file and include it as a resource in a regular .exe file. This .exe file would check if it's okey to run (check license conditions, keys, authorization etc...) and then, if authenticated, decrypt and extract the .MDL file, exec the runtime and pass the virtual path of the .MDL file as an argument to the runtime. For obvious reasons, i don't want to write the decrypted .mdl file somewhere on the disk, because somebody could just start the application, wait for the decrypter to write .MDL to temp, copy it from the temp and distribute it.

So, any idea how to do this? PS: I've got inspired from EA Games' games... when you run them and look into your process table, you see a regular game's exe, and, after certain time, it spawns a new process with name like ~A003.tmp

You should use boxedapp packer. It must help.

I am not aware of any method to have a virtual file associated with a path without using some kind of driver component; that is hard work.

Why don't you have the runtime do the decryption? Then you don't have to worry about decrypting the file on disk. Or you could create an unnamed inheritable section object to which to decrypt the item and pass the handle value to the runtime as a command line parameter.

Whatever you do, people will still be able to bypass it so it seems like a waste of time to me. Every EA game ever made has been cracked; people will either think your product is useful and worth the money or they won't. I don't think it is worth the time or effort to implement schemes more complicated than a very simple registration key check (just to make it look like you did something).