Survey: VI Analyzer and passwords

[Darren]

A few questions related to passwords with the VI Analyzer...please post your answers to the questions in the comments section of this thread:

1. Do you ever password-protect your VI Analyzer .cfg files?

2. If the password-protected .cfg feature went away, how much of a showstopper would that be?

3. Do you ever add passwords for password-protected VIs to be analyzed?

4. If the ability to add passwords for password-protected VIs went away, how much of a showstopper would that be?

We're considering a new human-readable file format for VI Analyzer .cfg files...if we move in that direction, storing anything related to passwords obviously becomes an issue. I wanted to gauge how important that functionality is as we're making decisions on this feature.

[adambro]

No/no problem to all questions.

Any increase in human readability of LabVIEW files is welcome, particularly for tracking changes in source code control.

[Hooovahh]

1. No

2. No

3. No

4. None

I'm sure others use this feature but I never have.

[Darren]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

I'm sure others use this feature but I never have.

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Can you add anything anecdotal to this comment? I've never heard of anybody using these two features, which is why I posted the survey, to find out anything I can from anybody who has used it or knows of someone who has.

[Hooovahh]

My comment was mostly due to the fact that I don't deal with password protected code much.  I'm not on the tools network with anything I want to protect.  

I assume this feature is for things like running VIA scans on code that is already secured.  Say I made a Tools Network package and before making the package it passwords all the VIs.  Now when I go to install it on a development machine the code is passworded, and if I want the projects's VIA scan to include it I need to provide the password.  But for other users of my code I'd need to provide the password which doesn't seem right.

But to me this work flow seems pretty flawed.  If I want to secure my code, I password it.  But if I want to scan my code with VIA, then I should be dealing with the source of the package, which I wouldn't expect to be passworded.  I'd expect to add the password to the code either just before, or during the build process. 

The only way I could see this feature being useful, is if the source to my VIPM package is already passworded, and I want to scan it with VIA.  But in this case I'd almost argue the effort to go into entering the password, or adding it to your LabVIEW PW cache is more than just locking and unlocking the VIs with Pre/Post build hooks in VIPM.  We use something similar where our reuse code locks all VIs in a Pre Build VI.  This isn't to protect the IP but to protect the code from developers who might not know the subVI they just drilled into is actually installed with a package and shouldn't be edited.  We have a VI for unlocking all of the VI after the build is complete but I rarely need to unlock all VIs in a package, just the couple I'd be editing.

So no, I've never heard of anyone using this.  And I don't see how it would work into my work flow very well.  I'd advice people to develop in their source which is open, and let the build process add the password, and remove it.  This also allows for randomized passwords which are different with each build.  If you are working with source to a package with passwords it seems like a lot of extra effort over having the scripting take care of it for you.

[James_McN]

Nope never used it or see that changing.

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

1. Do you ever password-protect your VI Analyzer .cfg files?

• No
• The only time I had a customer interested in password protecting cfg files was for an employee who was changing cfg files to look better. Needless to say that the employee left the company and that customer didn't see the need of password protecting cfg files anymore. That is one time in more than 10 years using VI Analyzer.

2. If the password-protected .cfg feature went away, how much of a showstopper would that be?

• None

3. Do you ever add passwords for password-protected VIs to be analyzed?

• No. In our case source code is always left without passwords and it is the source code the one we analyze with VI Analyzer. If password protection is ever added, it is done via source distribution or VIPM package build. 
• We have never had a need to use VI Analyzer on already distributed code.

4. If the ability to add passwords for password-protected VIs went away, how much of a showstopper would that be?

• None

[MarLentz]

I almost never deal with password protected code. The one project where I do I would rather not run VI-analyzer on as I know that there's a lot of quite bad old code in it, but not resources to do clean-up...

[joerg.hampel]

1. No

2. None

3. No

4. None

[joerg.hampel]

I'd like to add that I would love to see human-readable config files.