We are trying to enter serious commercial production using ESP8266 as a single chip solution running our application code. It makes sense since our volumes will be huge (millions) & we want to avoid an external microcontroller. We had painstakingly developed our application and then after frantically searching all the documentation, we are realizing that we cannot find any means of protecting our firmware code once its loaded into the ESP
So the big question in case we have missed out something, is there any sort of code read protection available so that someone cannot just copy our firmware from the ESP8266 (either using UART or copying the code directly from the external flash)?
If not, doesn't this seriously handicap the worthiness of using the ESP8266 in commercial applications as a standalone device?
Hope we can get some sort of solution as we have heavily invested in this. I know it sounds stupid, but having worked on flash microcontroller for over a decade, we thought that the code read protection was something to be taken for granted & didn't bother to check
Seriously, what if espressif themselves would "protect" their software the same way? It sounds a bit unfair to me this way. Also end users (like me) are getting a but fed up with binaries we cannot verify for quality, backdoors and stealth behaviour. My experience as a systems administrator and having a degree in cs is that the more the source is protected, the worse the quality of the code or the more unwanted behaviour, so I tend be kind of suspicious against fully "protected" code.
