Universal Extractor: Open source tool to extract installer files

[flyakite]

Thanks to XPero for pointing this out to me. Someone has developed a free, open source tool to extract installer packages.

Universal Extractor: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?...pic=62418&st=0

While in the past, there was no real way to decompile an NSIS package, that all seems about to change. The current release seems to only have preliminary support for NSIS, but I tested it and can confirm it works. It doesn't extract the project source the way it is laid out on the system, but any files that are included with your installer (tools, plugins, etc) will be extracted. Also, 1 main .nsi file is extracted in the process which contains all of the main code the installer itself uses when executing on the target machine.

For anyone who uses secret switches, passwords, or anything else in your installers, in theory if the user took the time to look through the .nsi script that is extracted and knew what they were looking for, they can find the correct information.

As well, if you have included the source for your installer that will be extracted with a secret switch or something simlar, say in case a local copy of the project is ever lost, all of that source will get extracted when using this tool.


So it's a neat tool, and it can be very useful for a lot of us, however I have a feeling it may also be used improperly by end users with the wrong intentions. Guess we'll see what happens.

[ggf31416]

Universal Extractor uses 7-zip 4.40 to extract NSIS installers