Code Security Question

I know most of the major players like Rockwell and Siemens have security for code that goes beyond the password protection of the controller. My question is this: Is anyone using any type of encryption that might be able to protect source code for HMI and PLC from multiple different manufacturers? My company is an OEM and this has recently come up in our internal discussions. I just wanted to see if anyone had any ideas here. Thanks in advance.

where i used to work, we had an oem that claimed company confidential information and locked the hmi terminals. we had them sent the file to some company as a backup with us as the other user if that company went out of business. there was a lot of legal red tape.
you are also walking on thin ice in my pinion. you may password protect a program for company xyz once, and then maintenance cannot get to it to debug a problem. the machine is down for several days waiting on your controls guys to come in. that will probably be the last job you do for them. then the word will spread and jobs will get harder to get.
also, you must check the wording on ALL purchase orders to see if you can even do password protection.
regards,
james

I am curious, when code is "stolen", is it the whole machine is copied or parts of the code is used in other machines?

Codesys and derivatives by default only donwload the code as a compiled binary. So unless you explicitly select to download the source code, noone can access the PLC code. But I guess, it can be copied to another machine.


You can prevent that copying by encrypting the application with a dongle.


https://content.helpme-codesys.com/en/CODESYS Development System/_cds_encrypting_application.html


James is right, that you must have some agreement documented, what should happen if your OEM company goes bust? What happens when the PLC or dongle fails?

We are getting into this as well.
We have a customer who also has their own machine building division.
We came up with a unique method for performing a very common operation on their products and its taken off (they have purchased 4 of these machines already with possibly another 2 - 6 in the next year).
I'm using Source Key protection and I know you can pick and choose which routines and such can be open, viewable or completely block using that.
And we have the sk file stored in several places on our network. and a few places on my local PC.
Their maintenance cannot access the file (nor do we want them to).
Literally the first thing the customer ask was a copy of the program...
We own the IP, and therefore not even letting them view the code cause its a very complicated but strong working system. I put too much work into it for someone to just steal it.
HMI is open cause its just an interface. But I have used password encryption for it as well.

Some PLC manufacturers IDE's can lock the source code in various ways i.e. lock for editing (Read only) partial lock i.e. certain routines or lock them so they are hidden, but allows download if replacement CPU is needed.
This seems the best compromise.

SLJackson said:

Is anyone using any type of encryption that might be able to protect source code for HMI and PLC from multiple different manufacturers?

Click to expand...

I'm a little bit confused here. You want to protect the source code of multiple brands, say, an AB PLC, a Siemens PLC, and an Ignition HMI all in one vendor agnostic tool? You could take the project files and make an encrypted zip file, but I don't think that's what you meant.

Usually source protection is done in the vendor's IDE, and is unique to that vendor.