User Guide

294 Chapter 11: Working with External Data
<allow-access-from domain="*.foo.com" to-ports="507,516" />
<allow-access-from domain="*.bar.com" to-ports="516-523" />
<allow-access-from domain="www.foo.com" to-ports="507,516-523" />
<allow-access-from domain="www.bar.com" to-ports="*" />
</cross-domain-policy>
Because the ability to connect to ports lower than 1024 is new in Flash Player 7 (7.0.19.0), a
policy file loaded with
loadPolicyFile is always required to authorize this, even when a SWF
file is connecting to its own subdomain.
About compatibility with previous Flash Player security models
As a result of the security feature changes in Flash Player (see “Flash Player security features”
on page 288), content that runs properly in Flash Player 6 or earlier might not run properly in
Flash Player 7 or later.
For example, in Flash Player 6, a SWF file that resides in www.macromedia.com could access data
on a server located at data.macromedia.com. That is, Flash Player 6 allowed a SWF file from one
domain to load data from a “similar” domain.
In Flash Player 7 and later, if a version 6 (or earlier) SWF file attempts to load data from a server
that resides in another domain, and that server doesn’t provide a policy file that allows access from
that SWF file’s domain, then the Macromedia Flash Player Settings dialog box appears. The
dialog box asks the user to allow or deny the cross-domain data access.
If the user clicks Allow, the SWF file is permitted to access the requested data; if the user clicks
Deny, the SWF file is not allowed to access the requested data.
To prevent this dialog box from appearing, create a security policy file on the server providing the
data. For more information, see “About allowing cross-domain data loading” on page 290.