Upper Austrian innovation links software to individual machines

Software designed to run industrial machines could receive new protection against counterfeiting through an approach developed by a company from Hagenberg in the Freistadt district, ORF reported. The method gives the machines’ control software a digital fingerprint.

The idea originated at the Software Competence Center Hagenberg. Project manager Michael Moser said the aim was to link the software to a single machine so that it could run only on one specific piece of hardware.

All of the machine’s components, including its memory and chips, receive a unique electronic fingerprint. If the software is transferred without authorisation to another device, such as a counterfeit machine, it loses its precision, significantly impairing the machine’s operation.

Plasser and Theurer, a market leader in track-construction machinery with a large plant in Linz, is already testing the protection mechanism. The company’s Johann Dumser said the quality of track positioning produced by its machines depended on millimetre-level precision.

Protecting the software was essential to maintaining the machines’ performance and precision under high loads, Dumser said.

According to the European Union Intellectual Property Office, counterfeit products not only threaten jobs in Austria but also cause billions of euros in damage each year in Europe’s machinery and plant-engineering sector. Product counterfeiting will remain a challenge, but the Upper Austrian innovation could make it considerably harder for counterfeiters to copy the machines.