A Concept for Secure Production Programming of Embedded Industrial Field Devices

The importance of securing the investment made in software is increasing for small embedded devices, as the size of the development efforts are rapidly growing. The meaning of securing in this context is related to protecting against cloning, prohibit reverse engineering of software, preventing alterations performed in order to tweak performance etc. Sales of illegal copies of devices are a major threat to industrial companies. We introduce a concept which mitigates the issues of counterfeiting and unauthorized production, allowing for production of embedded devices in locations which are not trusted. We define this concept as Secure Production Programming. It targets software-intense microcontroller-based embedded devices where it is crucial to protect the embedded software. Moreover, the concept allows for programming of the complete software in any (un-trusted) location without the risk of exposing the intellectual properties contained in the software, eliminating the risk that someone successfully can download the software on non-authentic hardware. A proof of concept implementation of the Secure Production Programming is presented, and performance figures are given.