Need Help Regarding AutoIt use

[hvchvc]

Hi all,

I wanted to use AutoIt in corporate environment. Is it safe to use AutoIt? Does it access any network after I install it on my machine?

Is it harmful in any way to my secured corporate code ? Any changes of my secured code getting leaked outside over internet?

Thanks

[jchd]

Hi and welcome to the forum,

AutoIt is safe for corp use. Look around and you'll see that a good number of high-profile members are themselves corp admins and use AutoIt for their job on a daily basis.

Neither AutoIt nor the executables which it produces unwillingly access to any network. The only two instances of a possibly unexpected network access is optional automatic check for new version of the AutoIt companion tools and the current version of the SQLite UDF.

The reason behind the later is that previous AutoIt distributions included the SQLite3.dll file, in both 32- and 64-bit versions. This was more than doubling the size of the product distribution. Hence it was decided that the UDF would try (hard) to locate the dll and in case of failure, download the latest 32- or 64-bit DLL from AutoIt repository.

In case of use of SQLite in a corp environment, I strongly recommend and even politely demand that you download the DLLs for yourself and embed it in executables which need it or otherwise make sure individual workstations don't download from our repository by the yard.

Aside from this and obviously when your application explicitely accesses the network or the Internet, no part of AutoIt will ever leak stuff from any machine, nor "call home", ever.

A couple of things you might be interested in knowing beforehand: due to some script kiddies misusing the product to cheat on games or attempt to create naive malware, some antivirus product report packed AutoIt executables as trojan or something. These false positives are no threat, read the sticky post about that point.

Last point: AutoIt uses an interpretor which means that at some point the full source code is in memory. A direct consequence is that you shouldn't place trade secrets inside AutoIt application code. But, as a seasoned professional, you already know that software is inherently unsecure and may be completely reverse-engineered, whatever language you use. Discussion of this subject is a taboo on the forum, as stated explicitely in the Forum Rules sticky above.

Now we're all here to help, especially serious users.

Welcome on board.

[hvchvc]

thanks a lot for a quick reply. I am willing to use AutoIt. Waiting for permissions. Your reply might be helpful for me to get those. Thanks once again.