I am about to begin the process of creating a Windows-based utility app to manage localized expressjs server that will utilize a graphical Windows based application to manage some of the features of this service
however before I begin I would like to speak with the community to try to get some advice Advice on how to properly protect the code since it will all be node JS bees I need to make sure it’s protected and some of my initial reading online seems to show that using electron by not be the most Safeway saw that being said how are you guys handling this to keep node JS these code protected with electron and in my case On windows environment
Any advice would be greatly appreciated much thanks
tl;dr You can and it is not worth the effort. Just pack your source into an asar file, it keeps most people away from it.
Long answer:
Use the asar option when building your app.
Obfuscate the code with an uglifier.
Use WASM
Language bindings to grab your data from a compiled format
neonjs for Rust
edge-js for C#
N-API, NAN for C/C++
Otherwise, your files are scripts, all these steps only slow down an attacker (tactic of many defenses), but they will not prevent them from accessing them. The devTools are fairly easy to get opened and people will be able to read the code in some way, shape or form. And if someone gets your obfuscated code, it is simple to reconstruct what is happening (see here for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Uzinz3DRU)
If you want to protect yourself from code manipulation, there are better ways to do it, like Hashing, Context Isolation etc. Electron has a whole chapter on the matter.
https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/master/docs/tutorial/security.md
Small Update (2020):
I've seen this library a few weeks ago and thought it would show a nice way to further obfuscate the code from being read by external parties
https://github.com/OsamaAbbas/bytenode
The basic idea is to compile the JS into bytecode for V8. This works very well for Electron and is definitely a hurdle not everyone will get over. But, this will not protect your code from being turned back into readable JS. It's just another layer of protection to make it more difficult.
Related
We have a static website, we outsource the website maintenance, we don't have source code repository, so contractor edits the code on production server directly.
It has no problem, as our website built decades ago with old school html4 only. What it store on the web server, is what the source code is.
At today, the web site can be composed by UI framework, eg. Vue, React....etc. Sometimes the HTML file contains web components and other JS module. I have done a little google to learn that, building a website today need NPM, NodeJs, Webpack, Gulp....etc, they manage js module and bundle / built the production code...
My problem is, we like to revamp our website with modern UI (HTML5, CSS3, mobile friendly...). The tools I just mentioned will "process" the source code and output production code. We don't have the source code server (eg. git server), for our contractor to store the source code. ( our company management doesn't allow us to purchase private repository services on the internet. eg..github, gitlab...etc).
Can I keep using the old school way? the source code on the production web server is always the only source code...
I have tried myself to using the require.js, it loads js module on the browser, so I can handle module loading without node.js and Webpack, and writing the web component in vanilla js. Is it the only solution I can do?
You certainly could continue to manage this site the "old school" way, but in doing so, you'll be ignoring the benefits that all the modern tools give you.
For example
no git (or other version control) means no rolling back changes (or errors)
using version control software also means you have a backup and you don't need to set up a backup scheme on the production server to save your files
editing on the production server means if someone makes a typo, the site is messed up; etc.
I would strongly recommend modern tools; if cost is a concern, consider free tools:
Bitbucket has long offered free private repositories; Github has recently also started offering them.
Tools such as Hugo, Jekyll, and others permit creation of static sites quickly and easily.
Edit in answer to some of the comments...
Switching to a more modern development workflow (including version control) is not just about saving money, it's also about:
Does the employer/client want their developer(s) spending a lot of time managing the site - possibly including fixing problems - or do they want them working on something else?
Is the employer/client willing to have periods of time when the site does not work correctly? As #birdspider mentions in the comments above, if you have multiple people working on the website on the production server, they're going to be messing up each others' work. Note that the use of a VCS helps avoid avoid some of the problems with people stepping on each others' toes and it also make fixing those conflicts so much easier.
If you approach the employer/client with these points and their answer is "we just don't like it", then there's probably not much else you can do. If I were in your shoes, I'd be strongly tempted to either a) implement something on my own (just to preserve my own sanity, although really this is probably not a good idea) or b) find a new job.
I've just started my IT degree and I'm a beginner to the use of APIs (and forums like this) so I am truly sorry if my question is to vaguely explained or if it is just plain stupid :), on top of that I'm not a native English speaker :P. Okay, so I'm trying to use Google trends' api which I installed in my server with putty by using sudo npm install google-trends-api. (it can be found here https://www.npmjs.com/package/google-trends-api#installation) As I undestand it, this is a server side api so the scripts that I write with the methods provided for this api will not run on an explorer as normal js files do. There is an example that makes use of the API that I found on the page which is as follows
var googleTrends = requite('google-trends-api');
googleTrends.hotTrends('US')
.then(function(results){
console.log(results);
})
.catch(function(err){
console.log(err);
});
this outputs a list of 20 items on the console when I use it on node.
I would like to know if there is a way to assign those results to a variable and then use that variable in a normal javascript script inside a html file. I do not know anything about node.js and the like, and I would like to actually do some research instead of asking here but I was going to use a different approach to acquire such information but now I've had to change my plans and do not have enough time and given I consider this is a fairly easy problem to resolve (maybe?) I would really appreciate it if someone could walk me through the basics of each step. THanks :) and have a nice day.
Your question is quite broad. Node.js is Chrome's V8 engine bundled with some libraries to do I/O and networking. This enables us to JavaScript outside of the browser and to create backend services or servers in general (in your case). I hope that you are aware of this difference :)
The first thing that you have to do, is to have a look at express.js and to create a simple server. It will not be more than 20 lines of code. Then you have to enrich this with more stuff like a template engine (handlebars.js, jade etc). You have to enable the server to serve static files that will be finally your js, css and image files. Creating this simple server you will be able to serve simple html page in the first place. On top of that you should have the client side javascript that you have to write and now you can use the module above. Unfortunately, you are not able to use this module directly on a javascript file that you will write. To be able to use this module you have to transcompile this thing into javascript that browser understand*. Remember that browser does not understand the require statement and some old browsers possibly will have issues with the promises that this module is using. These are the things that should be compiled. You have to use a tool like browserify for this and the compiled file that this will extract it must be included in the scripts of your html page.
Maybe there are quite a lot of concepts that you are not aware of or you don't understand them but spend a bit of time to understand them.
P.S.: I' ve replied under the assumption that google-trends-api module does not use things that are specific to node.js like the file-system for example.
I have created a C++ application using Pjsip Stack and my next step to create a plug-in,for which i am using firebreath. Being a newbee, I dont have any idea of including my C++ project in Firebreath application. Although I searched many links for over a week and tried stuff on my own, I couldnt come up with solution to my problem.
If I can get any guidance for the same I'll be grateful.
The first step is to learn how to write a firebreath plugin, which you can do by going to http://firebreath.org and following the tutorials. You need to keep a few things in mind, though:
Plugins have a different lifecycle than applications.
They start when the browser says and have to go away when the browser says and they can't block the main thread.
They run in a process that they don't own.
Global variables are shared between all instances of the plugin
There could be any number of said instances
Things like the current working directory should probably be left alone.
Turning an application into a plugin is more a process of porting than it is of embedding, and how hard it is depends on how well the application is written; remember that your plugin could be instantiated and destroyed many times before the process is unloaded, so if you have memory leaks it can be a major problem.
The main thing, though, as I said earlier, is just to learn how to write a firebreath plugin. You can best start that by looking at the examples in the repo (particularly fbtestplugin) and following the tutorial to create a new project, then just play until you figure it out. There is an IRC chat room and a google group where you can get help.
first things first , i have seen nwsnapshot. and its not helping.
i am building an inventory management system as a desktop app using node-webkit . the project being built is using compoundjs (mvc javascript library). which have a definite folder structure (you know mvc) and multiple javascript files inside them.
the problem is nwsnapshot allows the app to have only a single snapshot file but the logic of application is spread over all the folders in different javascript files.
so how do i secure my source code before shipping it to client? Or any other work-around Or smarter way (yes, i know about obfuscating).
You can use nodewebkit command called nwsnapshot to compile the javascript code into binary which will be loaded into the app without specifying any js file
nwsnapshot --extra-code application.js application.bin
in your package.json add this:
snapshot: 'application.bin'
It really depends on what you mean by "secure".
You can obfuscate your javascript code fairly well (as well as potentially improve performance) by using the Google Closure Compiler.
I'm not aware of any off-the-shelf solutions to encrypt/decrypt your javascript, and honestly I would question the need for that.
Some people think they need to make it impossible to view their source code, because they're used to dealing with compiled languages where you only ship binaries to users. The fact is, reverse-engineering that binary code was never as difficult as some people think it is, so if there's any financial incentive, there is practically no difference between shipping source code and the traditional shipping of binaries.
Some languages have offered genuine encryption of deployed assets, such as Microsoft's SLPS. It seems to me that the market for this was so small that Microsoft gave it to a partner (just my view). The truth is that most customers are not interested in taking your source code; they're far more interested in your ability to service and support that code in an efficient manner, while they get on with their job.
You may consider to merge the JS files into one in the build process and compile it.
I had a fresh look at Haxe again recently and realized that I had overlooked some of its elegance before. But I guess it lacks some visibility among the developers still.
So my question is, does anybody here use it for production? If so, how do you use it? What are the gotchas or difficulties you encounter? Do you recommend it for future projects?
I use Haxe to develop all my Flash applications, and I love it. I develop on Linux and with Emacs,
and I really like how I can make Haxe fit within my preferred development environment. I just use
simple Makefiles that look something like:
project.swf: Project.hx
haxe project.hxml
It's really easy to get started in Haxe, and it's very elegant. I've
had no problems at all using Haxe as compared to using the Adobe Flash
builders, and have developed a bunch of big projects including PanningPedagogy, The Orchive,Cantillion and Audioscapes.
I've released the source code to all of these as GPL on SourceForge, check them out at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/panning/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/orcaannotator/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/cantillion/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/margridflash/
You might find some useful information in the lists of Projects Using Haxe and People Using Haxe.
My company uses Haxe for production use. For programming swf content is absolutly no problem on the technical side. Using it on the server side is a little bit harder. If you Haxe for PHP you sometimes have some problems with typing (this is more or less a PHP problem). The neko vm is very stable and very very fast but it takes some time to get it running with all you other server software (mysql, apache - mod_rewrite), but once you got it you it is very stable.
We used it for generation swf applications, tried the possibilies of Haxe JS. Also we created socket server for a multiplayer game and start to generate all our webpages with Haxe PHP or neko.
The community is very helpful, the documentation is sometimes a little bit to short.
This is only my opinion and the experiences I made.
For those of us who don't know what Haxe is, it's a programming language for developing web apps. It has multiple compiler targets (Flash, php, JavaScript, and the Neko language's VM)
Welcome to haxe [haxe.org]
Haxe entry on Wikipedia
Haxe are currently gaining more popularity as a cross-platform development (mainly for game development) tools thanks to NME/OpenFL: http://www.openfl.org/
Write once in Haxe and deploy it to Flash, Android, iOS, and more..
HaxeJS is very good for web production, it allows to use all the underlying js modules while giving extra abilities like pre-processor, typed fields, conditional-compilation, classes, haxe libraries, refactoring and auto-completion from IDE etc.. plus its very quick to compile and output ready-to-use js files.
I haven't tried microsoft typescript, but so far I've been using HaxeJS for both client and server (nodejs) on a few production projects and it feels a great choice. The only issue is if i want to share js libraries or npm modules with others, I'll probably need to rewrite the js by hand then.
We used it at a previous internship, for an internal web system. We only compiled to js and I just once compiled some minor code to both js and C#. I can say it worked quite well and many custom widgets were made at the time. Debugging the produced js wasn't that bad either, but it sometimes didn't produce the code you wanted it to (I remember one string comparison issue in js, where the reference was being compared instead of the value). The code was deployed in production and had worked fine for years. I'm pretty sure they still use it today.
That was in 2013, I haven't used it since. One problem I did have was trying to compile code made in version 2.08 using version 2.10. It needed some minor, but non-obvious adjustments. I can't quite comment on more recent releases, but I'd be a bit careful on not breaking large pieces of code by upgrading to new versions of the compiler.
You compile, haxelib run flow run "target" in target you type for example web, and thats all, in your bin, folder you get your files, remember to configure your project.flow file acording to your target and project.