Machines made with built-in copy protection

The annual cost to industry of illegal copies of branded products is estimated at a staggering $650 billion worldwide, and German machine tool manufacturers are becoming an increasingly popular target for pirating operations.

Researchers are developing technical safeguards. © Volker Steger

Around one-third of all companies have seen their business eroded by cheap imitations of their products, especially manufacturers of textile machines, compressors and plastics processing equipment.

''Most companies have absolutely no idea just how easily their products can be copied,'' says Bartol Filipovic, head of the product protection department at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC in Garching near Munich. AISEC advises companies on how best to protect their products and IT services from unlawful attacks on their proprietary rights.

In the world of industrial machines, there are counterfeits of almost everything that can be copied, from housing design to instruction manuals. The most critical elements are those that give a product its ''intrinsic value'': electronic circuits and software that constitute its distinctive characteristics. This makes embedded systems with measurement, control, or signal processing functions prime targets for forgers.

Product pirates tend to steer clear of getting their own hands dirty, preferring to engage the services of those offering ''reverse engineering''. This involves performing the same development process only in the opposite direction, which begins by analysing exactly how the hardware is put together and creating circuit diagrams of the original product.

Reverse engineers can then rip the software and reconstruct the machine's control system and functions, thereby gaining access to the manufacturer's key know-how.