Protecting your GH scripts

[awg (Agron)]

Hi,
I have been reading about protection of company proterty and this case I am talking about the Grasshopper scripts. I found topics about using clusters or some other stuff, but is not quite what I am looking for.

Therefore wanted to ask again in the round if you have stumbled upon a new solution.
Personaly I think, having the possibility to blur out (password protected) a part or the whole script would be a good solution. In this case nobody would be abble to reproduce the script. In addition, by using a cluster you could stop the computation in the first place. Therefore for the wrong hands, this file with data would be unusefull.

Do you think such a case would be possible?

[inno]

Cluster password protection is like a piece of paper with the words “what’s written on the other side of this paper is a secret: don’t read it” and that is exactly the amount of protection it will give to your definition

with cluster password protection you more rely on the user not willing to look into the cluster content, it is designed to not allow the user to make changes to a portion of a definition, but it’s not intended for distribution

usually the best way to distribute a component that works like a “black box” is to hard-code it and compile as a standalone Component / Plugin

[maje90 (Riccardo Majewski)]

I’ve linked here 2 comments from David that summarize it all, but you should read the whole threads…

How to protect a Grasshopper program

It certainly shouldn’t be much slower when inside a cluster, I’d like to see this effect if you can share that file. But even the cluster password protection isn’t genuinely protection, it will not stop anyone who knows a modicum of C#. There is no way to protect a file that is expected to work without first decrypting it. If it must run when you load it, it must be automatically ‘openable’.

Secure .gh file

And when GH2 is released as open source it still needs to be secure from someone who has created their own version with all checks removed. This is in fact already possible since Grasshopper itself can be disassembled, modified, reassembled and even modified in its compiled state using libraries such as Mono.Cecil If you’re trying to protect your files against non-programmers, clusters with passwords are enough, if you’re trying to protect your files against programmers, you’re in the wrong Un…

Citing him:
“If you’re trying to protect your files against non-programmers, clusters with passwords are enough, if you’re trying to protect your files against programmers, you’re in the wrong Universe.”