https client ?

[adriaanrijllart]

Hi,

Does anyone know whether there are Labview VIs to act as an HTTPS client? The Internet Toolkit only seems to support HTTP, but not HTTPS.

Thanks,

Adriaan.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE(adriaanrijllart @ Aug 14 2007, 12:48 PM)

Hi,

Does anyone know whether there are Labview VIs to act as an HTTPS client? The Internet Toolkit only seems to support HTTP, but not HTTPS.

As far as I know it doesn't exist and the chance that it will is small. HTTPS requires a serious amount of encryption technology and writing encryption code in LabVIEW is not the most efficient thing to do. But the most critical aspect is the fact that writing encription routines is a tricky business that not many people know about, and unless you are an absolute pro in that area trying to do it is likely to not work or even worse pose serious security risks when using that code. Most people using LabVIEW are simply not professional encryption/security specialists.

Using existing C code has the problem that the actual HTTPS encryption actually is put at the lowest level just above the network protocol. So there would be only two possible ways:

1) inject an HTTPS encryption layer into the TCP/IP stack so that LabVIEW does not deal with that encryption at all. This is very difficult to do and would require some state aware encryption layer in a low point of the entire protocol stack that depends on the protocol state of a higher layer. Not really a good idea. Better idea in that context would be to use something like putty and just create a secure tunnel through which the normal HTTP protocol goes. This would require that you can influence the server side too, as you would have to setup an according VPN or similar connection.

2) using the C libraries implement the HTTPS protocol on top of the LabVIEW TCP/IP primitives. Technically the right way but so much work that I would not even consider doing it unless I can find a government sponsored project that would pay for that :-). In short forget it as it would be quite expensive already! Well cheaper and more secure than trying to implement the HTTPS security infrastructure entirely in LabVIEW, but still not practical.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[orko]

Until HTTPS is available natively in LabVIEW, you could use a SSL enabled version of curl called from a system exec to do this.

[Jim Kring]

On Windows, you can use data-socket, WinInet, or .NET (WinAPI).

[adriaanrijllart]

Thank you for your replies!

To Rolf: I was expecting this would not be easy directly in LabVIEW due to the low-level stuff a secure protocol requires. Thanks for all the details. I also like to say "Hi" because I remember we have met in Geneva many years ago.

To orko: I think that's a very good suggestion. I will explore this.

To Jim: Thank you, the datasocket is interesting. Strange this is only for Windows, while datasocket should work the same on Linux and Mac, but apparently it doesn't.

Cheers, Adriaan.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE(adriaanrijllart @ Aug 29 2007, 11:41 AM)

To Rolf: I was expecting this would not be easy directly in LabVIEW due to the low-level stuff a secure protocol requires. Thanks for all the details. I also like to say "Hi" because I remember we have met in Geneva many years ago.

Hi also. I do remember having met you and yes it is quite some time. In the meantime I'm living for already 11 years in the Netherlands ;-)

Greetings

Rolf Kalbermatter