Niagara wiresheets carry real intellectual property. The control logic on a sheet is often the accumulated result of years of sequence development, commissioning corrections, and site-specific tuning — and by default, anyone with Workbench access to that station can open it, read it, copy it, or take it somewhere else. For integrators and OEMs who develop proprietary logic, that is a genuine commercial exposure with very little standing between it and the door.
We developed a Niagara module that addresses it: a wiresheet security lock that protects the logic on a sheet from inspection and extraction. We are not aware of another commercially available equivalent in the Niagara ecosystem, though we would not claim to have surveyed every vendor.
What It Does
- Drag-and-drop protection — dropping the module onto a wiresheet populates and locks it in one action. There is no lengthy configuration procedure to get wrong or skip under deadline.
- Tamper response — if the protection is interfered with, the protected logic does not simply become readable. It is removed.
- Extraction resistance — the objective is that the programs and link data on a protected sheet cannot be lifted out and reused elsewhere.
We deliberately do not publish the mechanism. Describing exactly how a protection control detects tampering and what triggers its response is a roadmap for defeating it, and publishing that would make the module less useful to the people relying on it. The technical detail is available under NDA in a direct conversation.
Understand the Trade-Off Before You Deploy It
This is protection with teeth, and that cuts both ways. A tamper response that removes protected content is doing exactly what an IP-protection control should do — and it is also a destructive action on a live building system. That deserves a deliberate decision, not a default.
So we deploy it the same way we deploy anything consequential: the behaviour is explained and agreed in advance, the station owner knows what is protected and what happens if it is disturbed, and backups exist before it goes anywhere near a production station. If a client is not comfortable with the trade-off, the honest answer is that this control is not for them — not that we should quietly soften it.
Who This Is For
Systems integrators and OEMs who have developed genuinely proprietary control logic and are handing stations to clients, contractors, or competitors who will have Workbench access. If your differentiator is your sequences and your logic, and you are currently relying on nobody bothering to look, this closes a real gap.
It sits alongside the rest of our Niagara Framework development work — custom modules, drivers, and the engineering tooling we have built from doing the work. Where the concern is network-level rather than station-level, our sister practice covers OT and BACnet network security.
Tell us what logic you need protected and who will have station access — we will walk you through how the module behaves, what it commits you to, and whether it actually fits your situation.