Do you think your IP is protected by a patent? Think again.

I recently attended a manufacturing conference where I met with representatives of a number of companies involved in micro-machining, 3D printing, automation and design software, and other similar technologies. Their modern manufacturing technologies were very impressive. However, as I walked through the exhibits and spoke to many of the company representatives, I came upon a very troubling theme. When I asked how they protected their Intellectual Property, whether it be their proprietary hardware technology or software that controls their machinery, most thought their patents, End User License Agreements and copyright laws gave them the protection they needed. In light of the recent cyber-espionage case, where Chinese officials are accused of hacking into private-sector U.S. companies to gain trade secrets, I’m wondering whether these same people are thinking differently now. At least I hope they are.

Unfortunately, in the reality of today’s world, security is more important than ever, whether it be protecting your credit card and personal identity or intellectual property contained in a device or machine that may have cost millions of dollars to develop. Certainly these are investments worthy of protection.

In late March of 2014, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned: “Our nation’s reliance on cyberspace outpaces our cybersecurity. Our nation confronts the proliferation of destructive malware and a new reality of steady, ongoing and aggressive efforts to probe, access or disrupt public and private networks, and the industrial control systems that manage our water, and our energy and our food supplies.”

In modern manufacturing, control systems are increasingly interconnected and communicate via public networks, and all are controlled by some type of embedded software. And, software presents the greatest vulnerability to attacks – whether it be through introduction of malware or malicious tampering or theft through copying or reverse engineering. With the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), millions of devices, appliances, industrial machines and anything else you can imagine will be coming online, and therefore vulnerable to attacks.

Software developers themselves face the same risks. One of our customers relies on a base of approximately 700,000 lines of code that they claim represents more than 100 man-years of development. Once they were notified that their software had been copied and illegally exploited, they came to Wibu-Systems for a security solution.

One of our goals at Wibu-Systems is to provide software copy protection, IP protection, and integrity protection solutions based on cryptography and associated security mechanisms, such as digital signatures and message authentication. In this way we can protect system resources, programs and data against unauthorized manipulation, or outright theft or counterfeiting of complete systems and software.

To see how we do it in more detail, I invite you to download our whitepaper, Software Integrity Protection for Embedded Systems.