Should we be signing our packed project libraries?

[infinitenothing]

Not checking the signature seems like a potential security risk as someone could swap in a tampered PLL and potentially the caller wouldn't notice and that "hack" could go undetected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary_code_execution

Also I noticed the PPL can use VI server to monitor/manipulate it's caller. Here's an example VI that could be injected into a PPL VI. It seems to me that a PPL shouldn't get access to its caller.

 

 

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 7/29/2021 at 3:12 AM, infinitenothing said:

Not checking the signature seems like a potential security risk as someone could swap in a tampered PLL and potentially the caller wouldn't notice and that "hack" could go undetected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary_code_execution

Also I noticed the PPL can use VI server to monitor/manipulate it's caller. Here's an example VI that could be injected into a PPL VI. It seems to me that a PPL shouldn't get access to its caller.

That's fairly paranoid considering that any VI, even when running in a PPL is basically still executing inside the same process. There are a lot more things it can do that could be much more dangerous, but you have to strike a balance between security and performance. Starting to isolate each PPL completely from the rest of the system would take up a huge amount of development effort and also cause a lot of performance loss. You wouldn't like that at all!

VI server has some strict limitations when it is operating across LabVIEW contexts but limiting it even inside the same context would be to restrictive and it would also mean that you have to consider the entire scripting interface in LabVIEW as very dangerous.

And yes if you use PPLs they could be swapped out by an attacker. But if that is really your concern you may have a lot of other more grave trouble. Who lets such a person even have access to that computer? Why would they attempt to attack a PPL on that system when they can have the entire cake and eat it too? It's many times easier to attack DLLs, yes even with signed DLLs, and take over the entire system, than trying to hack into a PPL with its proprietary format and only get a crude control over a single LabVIEW application on that system.

Edited August 3, 2021 by Rolf Kalbermatter