Author Topic: Protecting Intellectual Property  (Read 5745 times)

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Offline ow19mTopic starter

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Protecting Intellectual Property
« on: May 09, 2022, 05:15:41 pm »
Hi ,
I am designing a Complex system and I was wondering about ways someone can protect  intellectual property to keep hackers from breaching in , can someone list possible ways I should be considering at the manufacture stage ?. Also if I remove labels from all the IC's , is it possible to track what IC it could possibly be from for example chinese companies  , for example if I remove a mcu's label ,would it be possible to know which company that mcu belonged to , let alone find what of all the possible controllers with the same footprint ,the exact chip number ?.

Thanks
 

Offline ataradov

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #1 on: May 09, 2022, 05:26:19 pm »
Forget about it, if you come up with anything really interesting, it will be copied within days if someone really wants. Figuring out ICs is trivial.

The only reliable protection is to have cloud connectivity and make the device useless without that connection. But this is extremely annoying to the customers.

Realistically, just do the bare minimum (set lock bits on the devices and stuff like that) and hope for the best.

Using more expensive parts and larger variety of parts may help too, but it will obviously make the product less attractive to your own customers.
« Last Edit: May 09, 2022, 05:37:40 pm by ataradov »
Alex
 
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Offline ow19mTopic starter

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #2 on: May 09, 2022, 06:17:35 pm »
Well maybe your right, the design is basically a 3 phase 100KVA welding Inverter , only a handful of companies have designed such a beast , I'm doubtful it would be that easy to just breakopen everything with over 300+ parts , 8 PCBS. It's not easy to test something that doesnt do continous operation and 440v running through most of the boards  and we're talking about debugging different driver , IGBT boards , CPU.My question is the preventive measures I can take off and the hard truths I'm missing , off course otherwise anything is possible.

thanks,   
« Last Edit: May 09, 2022, 06:21:30 pm by ow19m »
 

Offline ataradov

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #3 on: May 09, 2022, 06:38:58 pm »
Well, so you already follow my advice on making the device too complicated to copy because of many parts. And in your case mechanical design matters too.

You are already in a good place. Rubbing off IC marking is a waste of time. Don't bother, in all cases where is mattered ICs were figured out instantly. Just set lock bits on the MCUs and you will be fine.
« Last Edit: May 09, 2022, 06:43:09 pm by ataradov »
Alex
 
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Offline ow19mTopic starter

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #4 on: May 09, 2022, 07:15:43 pm »
One possible way to hack into a processor is side channel attack , that too isn't possible without knowing the chip number  I believe  , Just for knowledges sake ? why do you think removing labels is a waste?
 

Offline elecman14

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #5 on: May 09, 2022, 07:34:24 pm »
Removing part numbers could slow down reverse engineering efforts. An advanced persistent threat could
just decap the chips and look at die markings and pinout on the PCB to determine what device you are using. It really depends on the threat model you are concerned about for cloning. After working in manufacturing having an operator with a tool capable of removing plastic near components is a thing that would keep me up at night. If you are serious about this you may want to look into fixturing the PCB with a shield to prevent damage to surrounding components.

 

Offline ataradov

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #6 on: May 09, 2022, 07:45:23 pm »
One possible way to hack into a processor is side channel attack , that too isn't possible without knowing the chip number  I believe  , Just for knowledges sake ?
It is trivial to find out the processor by pinout and package type. There are not too many combinations out there. Even if you are very confused, anyone can use a bit of acid and extract the die. It is not as trivial, but it is the level of effort I would expect if I were about to copy the device.

why do you think removing labels is a waste?
Because it has been historically shown to be a waste. I can't name a single case where removing the labels helped to hide the device type. Furthermore, people sometimes do it for fun just in spite. So erasing package marking attracts more attention than it should. And it also forces people to reverse engineer at least part of the board around your device to figure out what it is. Dave did it multiple times during the teardowns and there were multiple topics in this forum.

It is more productive to remove labels from power devices, especially in standard packages like TO-220. But again, it is a protection against straight up copy-paste. But anyone intelligent would adopt the design to their available parts anyway.

You have finite amount of time to spend on that product and its protection, but if your product is valuable, copying people will spend a lot more time on copying it.

Also, using more obscure parts like Holtek and Padauk may slow things down quite a bit, since they would be the last in line to be checked.
« Last Edit: May 09, 2022, 07:54:25 pm by ataradov »
Alex
 
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Offline free_electron

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #7 on: May 09, 2022, 08:08:56 pm »
put some components in it that are specifically designed for you.
Professional Electron Wrangler.
Any comments, or points of view expressed, are my own and not endorsed , induced or compensated by my employer(s).
 

Offline ataradov

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #8 on: May 09, 2022, 08:18:32 pm »
put some components in it that are specifically designed for you.
Is it really feasible for a small volume production?

Custom MCU pinouts are possible from most vendors, but your minimum order quantity would be 10K-100K units.

You may also want to consider creating custom epoxy filled sub-modules. It will not stop copying, but will certainly slow down the effort.

And as usual, in may cases there is no need to actually copy the low power stuff. Copy high power design and re-implement low power stuff using any MCU you like.  Even people in China rarely copy designs 1:1. They have plenty of smart people capable of taking the ideas and going with them.
« Last Edit: May 09, 2022, 08:22:03 pm by ataradov »
Alex
 
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Offline elecman14

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #9 on: May 09, 2022, 08:42:01 pm »
...
You may also want to consider creating custom epoxy filled sub-modules. It will not stop copying, but will certainly slow down the effort.
...

Epoxy filed modules (potting) are not super fun to deal with on the manufacturing side. It also complicates troubleshooting and failure analysis and has its own set of design issues like thermal expansion, temperature dissipation, mechanical stress, etc... If you want to live with all that it does make it harder to reverse engineer.

 
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Online Doctorandus_P

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #10 on: May 11, 2022, 03:04:26 am »
How much intellectual property is there in a welding converter anyway?

As you already said, the 100kW market for these things probably is not very big and it probably is a "professional" market.
How many of your potential customers would even be interested in a cheap knockoff of your welder?

These things are going to cost an arm and a leg anyway. Maybe you will sell one or two of them to your direct competitors if your thing can do something that theirs version can't, and they will probably only be interested in some specific details.

Rubbing off type numbers only annoys hobbyists and repair people, as it may slow them down for 20 minutes to a few hours.

There are companies in reverse engineering stuff. Extracting machine code of almost any uC cost a few hundred EUR, and so does getting a set of Gerber files from a PCB. Layer count don't matter much, the PCB is just sanded down layer by layer, photographed and processed.
« Last Edit: July 13, 2022, 08:11:26 pm by Doctorandus_P »
 

Offline ow19mTopic starter

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #11 on: May 11, 2022, 08:10:41 am »
@Doctorandus_P , where I live there are no competitors for welding inverters , firstly ,imported inverters are very expensive , also nothing last for ever , you know at some point you'll have maintenance issues in which case you'll have to send it back to the company  , they will charge you money and send it back which people aren't willing to do. I have contacts with automotive industries that are setup here like KIA , SUZUKI ,COROLLA, CHANGAN  , HONDA  and even more , non of them have inverters installed ,, hence big electricity bills and I'm sure it costs them the quality weld as well . trust me nobody wants to order 1000 welding inverters in a company  where your bound to have maintaince issues and nobody in the country is willing to fix it  , plus waste of time on the assembly line . and calling someones product a "cheap knockoff" is a harsh statement without even looking at the design . 
« Last Edit: May 11, 2022, 08:21:29 am by ow19m »
 

Online JPortici

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #12 on: May 11, 2022, 09:42:12 am »
Every piece of hardware can be copied / adapted / replicated.
Don't bother making it too difficult to do, instead you should focus on what CAN'T be copied which is support and customer care. Technical support, customer training, responsiveness in addressing problems/complaints/fixes/adding features, possibly customization.
The customer has to come to your company because they want to deal with your company, not just buy your product and that what lets you charge xxx more than the competitor/replica/knockoff
 
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Offline PKTKS

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #13 on: May 11, 2022, 09:57:49 am »

(.)
The only reliable protection is to have cloud connectivity and make the device useless without that connection. But this is extremely annoying to the customers.
(.)


... infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or software as a service (SaaS)...


Chinese security CAM are doing this...   it is a shit show...

The cams depend on Internet to setup  and promote a useless product 50% of times..

Consumers will eventually ditch that sort of CLOUD crap stored on someone else rack

Paul
 

Offline ow19mTopic starter

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #14 on: May 11, 2022, 12:59:05 pm »
So basically if there were no copy violations , china would have made an exact copy of iphone ,ps4, with the exact same QUALITY and DURABILITY ? Last time I saw something copied ,was even worse then the original one  , anyone ?  :-DD
 

Offline PKTKS

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #15 on: May 11, 2022, 01:14:15 pm »
Not like that ...  a long time now...

For quite some time... all production of low level has moved ..
mostly to these facilities ... 

Not so long ago a folk published a trip made to China where he - armed with a list of parts - bought each one piece by piece...  mounted ....  all iphone parts...

He went back to hotel room and assembled the so called incredible iphone in hour or so...
Since the big corporations  decided to outsource production.. things are not  that simple...

Mostly moved by greed and some weird concepts attached to brand... instead of craftsman ...

Greed have bad side effects..

Paul
 
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Offline PKTKS

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #16 on: May 11, 2022, 01:29:40 pm »
Here .. have fun with this...

I am not sure if this is the same folk of years ago...
because so many people copy that idea... a simple search will put dozen others...



Paul
 

Offline dietert1

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #17 on: May 11, 2022, 02:49:53 pm »
Fun to remember. Maybe 25 years ago i built a 3 KW inverter for a photovoltaic setup (island solution with 48 V lead battery as storage). It was a prototype and the contract was with an engineer who worked at Brown Boveri Corp. I remember setting up the MCU with part of the firmware in a battery backup RAM, where the battery was connected with an intrusion protection (mechanical switch). So as soon as anybody would lift the cover or pull the MCU card, it would be dead within seconds.
That happened more than once. Don't know whether they reengineered it or not.

Regards, Dieter
 

Offline ataradov

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #18 on: May 11, 2022, 03:24:07 pm »
china would have made an exact copy of iphone ,ps4, with the exact same QUALITY and DURABILITY ?
No, why wold they bother? They need their stuff to look close enough and last long enough to make a sale.

There are two goals of copying. First one is to make the product cheap and sell it at a good markup informed by the price of the original. This is what China does easily.

The second one is to make an off-brand replica with basically the same internals, but with modified physical design to distance from the original. That copy may be a bit cheaper than the original, but that would be mostly due to lower margin the maker is willing to take, since they did not spend any money on R&D. This is what "western" companies do.

And iPhone is a special case, since it is full of proprietary parts and tied to the cloud.

Alex
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #19 on: May 11, 2022, 05:38:00 pm »
I am designing a Complex system and I was wondering about ways someone can protect  intellectual property to keep hackers from breaching in , (...)

Apart from what has already been said, I'm wondering what your goal exactly is. Do you want to protect your product so that it's not easily copied (which could harm your sales), or do you want to protect it against "hackers" for security reasons? Everyone has assumed it was for the first reason, and I guess it sounds so, but just to make sure.

One thought is that one of the main reasons your product may eventually get copied is if it's very successful. Apart from nerds in their basement, nobody (and especially no company) is going to bother copying a product unless it has already proven to be successful. That's the whole point: it saves R&D sure, but also all the marketing. And if this is the case, that would be good news for you, really. When one of your products becomes successful enough to get copied on a scale large enough to impact you, that means you did a good job and that it's time to design a new product (but don't wait for that, start right away!)

Now as with door locks and most security measures, the only thing you can do is to make it a bit slower to copy, you will never be able to prevent this completely. I agree with scratching labels on ICs being almost completely useless - that may work for amateurs not having much experience or equipement, but for professionals, this won't do much. Using "exotic" parts with hard to find documentation would already help a bit more, but even so, if you manage to get documentation for your chips and get ahold of them, someone else can as well. Unless you're going to design ASICs. Something that may be worthwhile only if you're going to sell millions of products, or more.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #20 on: May 11, 2022, 05:50:23 pm »
Hahah! Removing IC labels, I always wonder why anyone does that, do they really think it will stop me from identifying the IC? If anything it encourages me to try to reverse engineer something, it's a challenge, and it usually isn't very hard to identify what a part is by the pinout and how it's used in the circuit. The only thing it makes harder is repair. It's a speed bump that slows things down slightly, nothing more. 
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #21 on: May 11, 2022, 05:56:09 pm »
You may also want to consider creating custom epoxy filled sub-modules. It will not stop copying, but will certainly slow down the effort.

That's no more effective than grinding the numbers off, it attracts me to find out what's inside the potted module. I have access to an xray machine and can quickly get an image of it. I have also become quite adept and de-potting using heat and various mechanical means. If I'm willing to sacrifice one of the modules I can expose the bottom of the PCB, heat it up and then peel the whole PCB off of the epoxy block leaving the components neatly laid out in the resin where they can be measured and/or removed individually.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #22 on: May 11, 2022, 06:05:38 pm »
Fun to remember. Maybe 25 years ago i built a 3 KW inverter for a photovoltaic setup (island solution with 48 V lead battery as storage). It was a prototype and the contract was with an engineer who worked at Brown Boveri Corp. I remember setting up the MCU with part of the firmware in a battery backup RAM, where the battery was connected with an intrusion protection (mechanical switch). So as soon as anybody would lift the cover or pull the MCU card, it would be dead within seconds.
That happened more than once. Don't know whether they reengineered it or not.

Regards, Dieter

Capcom used something similar in some arcade games, a battery backed RAM held the decryption key IIRC. For the inverter it seems like it would be fairly easy once you'd had this happen once. You then know where the intrusion detection switch is so you can drill a hole to access the switch or the wiring and disable it. Then solder a battery to the power pins of the RAM, pull it out and extract the code.
 

Offline dietert1

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #23 on: May 11, 2022, 08:42:47 pm »
Nowadays intrusion detection may be a 0805 photo sensor shielded from light. In a larger board this will cause quite some delay for RE. Also i like those one-wire EEPROMS. Those can be fairly small parts with just two pins. It's a good idea to combine chips of different brands so they block each others backdoors. RE resistance depends on adding something "strange" or "superfluous", that takes time to understand. E.g. non-standard hash codes or the like.

For our oximeter modules we separated system from application. We can distribute encrypted application firmware updates and users can apply, but not disassemble them. They cannot debug either as the system is well protected. So the whole firmware remains execute-only. Another method that can be used in industrial (non-consumer) markets are special configuration tools, so part of the IP is never distributed with the product.

In my opinion it's a waste of effort to develop a product and not protect it from the very beginning. If people write how easy it is to break protections, this may be a bit misleading, similar to those independence day or mission impossible movies..

Regards, Dieter
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Protecting Intellectual Property
« Reply #24 on: May 13, 2022, 02:55:29 am »
Well there are few things that make me happier than seeing a protection system cracked wide open. I absolutely hate them, and will do whatever I reasonably can to help crack something that is protected just for the sake of doing it. I still remember all the effort that went into protecting the original xbox console and then it was cracked wide open within days of hitting the retail shelves. LOL
 
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