LabVIEW
File Encryption
Encryption build into LabVIEW quite likely is a bad idea. There is no gurantee that such a solution would not have a security hole somehow and it is unlikely NI would give you the source code to LabVIEW to check it and even more unlikely that they would make it available for a public peer review. Encryption and security isn't NI's core business and other companies whose core business it actually is have made big mistakes in the past here, so I don't think it is safe to assume that NI could tackle this better than some of the security specialized companies.
@alysko wrote:At the moment, there is no special security features implemented in LabVIEW besides passwords. I need to have encryption to transfer data over the Internet. The level of security is the next topic. To discuss the topic of the level of security, you need to have some. Right now, there is NOTHING to use (supplied by NI), so the need is to have something and then it can be enhanced.Another feature I would like is to be able to run secure web site with labview (to implement https server). This could be another solution and would exend the usability of LabVIEW further.
So the solution here is to go with some external solution and there are quite a few and then you know to what standard the actual encryption implementation is up to. One would be to install some ssl software pluging into the TCP/IP socket such as a VPN client. LabVIEWs TCP/IP function will just use the TCP/IP socket which gets properly routed through your secured socket plugin.
Or you can use putty and redirect its standard IO to a stream and interface that to LabVIEW. Or you can incorporate one of the many Open Source encryption libraries either through Active X (on Windows) or the Call Library Node on all platforms.
And implementing https in LabVIEW is definitely a bad idea. LabVIEW IS NOT a web server and never should be. Instead of using monolithic huge monster applications trying to solve umptien things and all of them only for 95% it is always better to use several dedicated applications solving one thing but that one for 100%. A properly defined interface between the components is all that is left and ensures that if a bug is found in one part, you can upgrade that part without breaking the whole thing.
If on the other side some problems would be found in the encryption implementation used by NI to incorporate such features in LabVIEW you often would have to wait for the next software realease of LabVIEW one year later to get that fixed.
Rolf Kalbermatter
