Dongle as copy protection for machine controls
ECKELMANN has put an end to product piracy by developing a dongle that can be used with any PLC control or continuous path control system which supports the CANopen® protocol. The mode of operation can be easily transferred to other fieldbus systems such as Profibus or Devicenet.
PLC and continuous path control programs contain a great deal of intangible assets of machine manufacturers in the form of technological know-how. The protection of control software against illegal copying thus becomes a vital aspect of control design. And the more so as the use of standard hardware makes machine copying increasingly easy.
The dongle from ECKELMANN provides:
Perfect machine protection
Perfect know-how protection by
- dynamic code generation
- cyclic program scanning
- cyclic station scanning
fits CANopen® fieldbus and others
CAN dongle: enhanced encryption
Now, how does a fieldbus dongle work? The dongle is an independent fieldbus module, which is provided with a cheap 8 bit processor and communicates with the controller via the internal CAN bus. The controller itself sends a combination of numbers, which is processed in the dongle processor according to a programmed mathematical formula. The crucial point is that the firmware of the dongle processor cannot be read and thus cannot be copied. Next the dongle returns its result to the controller, which verifies the correctness of the mathematical transformation. The response to the verification is subject to a customer specific configuration: The controller may stop operation already after a single false response or switch over to a safety mode. However, an arbitrary failure tolerance can be chosen as well.
This safety technology can be enhanced by a cyclical change of the mathematical formula for computing the verification result. For this additional computing parameters are supplied to the dongle from an internal memory of the control system (rewritable non-volatile flash memory).
In both cases, operation of the machine without the read-protected original dongle is impossible. Therefore copying the application software of the controller is absolutely useless. Even an exact copy of the machine and the control system is useless because there is no release from the CAN dongle. Things cannot be made more difficult for pirates in the field of machine construction.
Datasheet  CAN Dongle
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