Hide Gateway Scripting Libraries from Other Users in Perspective Project?

[TechEnlive]

Hi everyone,

In my Perspective project, I’ve created several libraries in the Gateway Scripting section. Is there a way to hide these libraries from other Gateway users so they are not visible or accessible?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[bschroeder]

If you are trying to protect proprietary information, the only reliable way to do that is with a module. And even those can be reverse-engineered to a point.

[pturmel]

A more detailed discussion:

Best practice to prevent to stolen ignition resources

Hi, As system integrator, there are some cases that I like to protect my resources in ignition after delivering project to client. For example creating a library that use resources like python lib and views,… In other SCADA packages I can put password and encrypted the resource. The resource can be used by system but can’t modify by others unless they know password. The protect option in ignition doesn’t work because when other can access to gateway config they can change the role and passwo…

[TechEnlive]

Hi,
Can you help to understand this. I will be thankful to you.

[paul-griffith]

If someone has access to the designer, they can read any Ignition project or configuration data.
Full stop. There's no way to prevent that, and there won't be for the foreseeable future.

The only thing close to intellectual property protection is to use the module SDK to compile your business logic into a module. You will, however, find that Java code is trivially decompilable unless you go to great efforts to obfuscate your code at build time.

Protecting source code is fundamentally incompatible with delivering code to end users to execute on their own hardware. No matter the language, with sufficient effort it can be decompiled or reverse engineered.

Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion, not an official stance of Inductive Automation LLC, I am not a lawyer, etc.

Instead of burning money on ultimately pointless attempts to "protect" source code:

1. Establish a relationship with customers where the valuable part is your support of the code, not giving them a black box they cannot inspect.
2. Be willing to fire customers for shenanigans like attempting to reverse engineer your IP, and accept that anyone willing to do that was not a good customer in the first place.

[bschroeder]

@paul-griffith sums it up the best.