Also new in SmartInspect 3.0 is encryption support for log files. It is not unusual to write proprietary and sensitive information (such as implementation details) to log files that have to be protected from third-parties or even customers.
Some SmartInspect users have already implemented encryption support on their own and we are happy that the upcoming SmartInspect version has full built-in support for log file encryption. The nice thing about integrating this feature directly into SmartInspect over using a custom solution is that we also added support for log file decryption directly to the Console. This means that if you try to open an encrypted log file in the Console, you get a "Enter key" dialog which asks for the encryption key, decrypts the log file and then loads it as usual.
The encryption feature uses the secure and fast AES (Rijndael) encryption algorithm. We decided to use 128-bit keys since they are not subject to export restrictions, are sufficient secure and offer the best performance.
Coming next is the new pipe protocol for logging over named pipes.
4 Comments
This is really a very good feature. However, will it be possible to use “custom” encryption algorithms or do you not provide any interfaces for that?
We currently do not provide a way to use custom encryption algorithms, but you could always change the existing file protocol or better, copy and change it (it’s easier to update SmartInspect then).
We do not provide an interface to change the algorithms for several reasons:
- AES is the defacto standard algorithm for symmetric encryption and there aren’t many reasons not to use it
- Besides implementing an interface in all three libraries, we would also need to add a plugin system to the Console to allow loading of alternative encryption algorithms. This would be way to costly for such a simple feature
Maybe I missed it, and it is alreayd in SmartInspect, but: Is there any compression option for the log files? My files tend to get rather large quickly and it is becoming a nuisance to tell the customer to ZIP them first.
Thomas, we do not have a file compression option in SmartInspect at the moment. If we added it to SmartInspect (this is already on our feature request list), we would probably add this feature to the SmartInspect Router.
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