Pro-Protect

The fight against product pirates has become more and more intense in the industrial world: The threat is ubiquitous and reaches from fake machine parts to the illicit copying of complete industrial installations. Software already represents a major commercial factor: It accounts for a constantly growing share of innovation in mechanical engineering. Protecting this crucial asset effectively is thus an essential piece of protecting the innovative products themselves. As industrial manufacturing is moving more and more into a digitalized world, these protections need to cover the invaluable digital production data.

The project aims at transferring the software protection solutions long established in the realm of desktop computing to industrial manufacturing. It responds to the calls from mechanical and plant engineers for a more comprehensive answer to the threat of product piracy, making it harder for criminal actors to reverse engineer and replicate machines or components that are equipped with complex software capabilities and defending against the methods used to copy machine controller software and produce cloned products with these illicit means.