SPS 2023: Intro­ducing the Novel Flag­ship Store for the OI4 Commu­nity by Hilscher for Indus­trial Appli­ca­tions

A trans­parent process enabling indus­trial app publishers to market their apps securely. 

Encryp­tion and licensing, cour­tesy of CodeMeter tech­nology

Authors: Uwe Schnepf, Head of Product Manage­ment Indus­trial IoT, Hilscher Gesellschaft für Systemau­toma­tion mbH, and Elke Spiegel­halter, PR Officer for Wibu-Systems 

Orig­i­nally announced for Hannover Messe 2023 and now ready for launch in November at SPS 2023: Members of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance (OI4) have teamed up in a special task force to turn the vision of an open, vendor and hard­ware-agnostic app store into reality. Their mission was to create an open and trans­parent process that can work on different app stores and that empowers indus­trial app publishers with a simple, stan­dard­ized, and secure means to market their apps to indus­trial users as free or paid down­loads from a dedi­cated app store. 

Prospec­tive users can go virtual window-shop­ping in such app stores to find the right apps for them and to buy, inte­grate, and operate them in the simplest and most secure way possible. The stan­dard­iza­tion efforts of the OI4 mean that apps that subscribe to the rele­vant stan­dards should run without issue and be able to share data on as many end devices as the user wants. 

Planned for SPS 2023, the formal launch of the Flag­ship Store for the OI4 Commu­nity , devel­oped and oper­ated by Hilscher in coop­er­a­tion with the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance, will be a vivid example of the impact of OI4 work in this area. It will give the makers and users of indus­trial apps a simple and trust­worthy way into their future coop­er­a­tions in the area.  

A white paper is being readied for SPS 2023 to get app providers that want to use this App Store  informed about the tech­nical require­ments for launching OI4 compliant apps through the OI4 Commu­nity App Store. Apps that do not meet all of these spec­i­fi­ca­tions can also be included in the app store. Another white paper will include the mani­fest needed to define the tech­nical details for uploading apps into the App Store. 

The tech­nology behind the Flag­ship Store for the OI4 Commu­nity 

Hilscher Gesellschaft für Systemau­toma­tion mbH has worked in close part­ner­ship with the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance, specif­i­cally the working groups tasked with facil­i­tating the digital tran­si­tion in indus­trial produc­tion. Together, they created the concept of a Commu­nity Store for OI4 Members with a fully featured and scal­able e‑commerce plat­form on http://flagshipstore.hilscher.com/. Preparing for the offi­cial launch at SPS 2023 with other app part­ners from the OI4 universe, Hilscher is respon­sible for running the new market­place. And a true market­place it is, as each app publisher brings their app(s) to market. The system allows real trans­ac­tions, that is, the purchasing of apps from the App Store, using industry-stan­dard payment methods, such as credit cards, direct debit, or invoices. The app publishers are the legal sellers of the apps, which means that any contract that is formed exists directly between the app publisher and the app users. 

The tech­nology making the App Store possible relies on so-called containers, an open source solu­tion for virtu­ally running apps on indus­trial PCs and edge gate­ways. Any app that is avail­able as a container app (e.g., for Docker) can be deliv­ered through the App Store. Once deliv­ered, running the apps is also made easier by the OI4’s efforts at simpli­fi­ca­tion and stan­dard­iza­tion. A concept has been prepared for inte­grating an inter­face, defined by OI4, into the already avail­able edge manage­ment systems. The API could in the future make it possible to deliver apps from the App Store  to a type of digital delivery address. The edge manage­ment system can then distribute and install the apps around the shop floor. Hilscher’s own device and appli­ca­tion manage­ment solu­tion netFIELD.io is one such edge manage­ment system and will work in tandem with the Hilscher App Store for the OI4 Commu­nity. 

But the app store should not be limited to apps alone: Consulting and other services and hard­ware like gate­ways, edge gate­ways, or indus­trial PCs designed for indus­trial commu­ni­ca­tion could also be sold over the Internet. With this in mind, Hilscher already started before the launch of the App Store to search for inter­ested part­ners and providers, a search that will inten­sify after the launch. All enter­prises inter­ested in the OI4 marketplace’s concept and the ability to use it as vendor or customer can contact Hilscher for more infor­ma­tion. 

Encrypted and licensed

The apps sold through the Hilscher Flag­ship Store for OI4 Commu­nity or, more specif­i­cally, the intel­lec­tual assets invested in them have to be protected from theft and illicit use. For that purpose, Hilscher turned to Wibu-Systems for their CodeMeter soft­ware protec­tion tech­nology. CodeMeter has been built right into the app store and lets app publishers protect their work, if they so choose, before uploading it to the App Store . CodeMeter Protec­tion Suite can auto­mat­i­cally encrypt and add license checks to apps in just a few minutes. It is avail­able in a large variety of program­ming languages and plat­forms, supporting all envi­ron­ments that work with tradi­tional machine code, like C/C++, Rust, and Go, but also languages that operate with inter­me­diate code like Java and .NET or script languages where the source code is deliv­ered, such as Python and JavaScript. There is also a licensing API that can even license indi­vidual features sepa­rately or create freemium options. 

Auto­matic encryp­tion means that the IP in the app is safe from product piracy and reverse engi­neering. The right soft­ware key (ticket) to acti­vate the app after down­load from the Hilscher Commu­nity Store  is made avail­able as part of the trans­ac­tion. When the license is acti­vated, it is bound to the device it is acti­vated on, which stops the soft­ware from being dupli­cated, e.g., by cloning the Docker container. 

To keep rights manage­ment as straight­for­ward as possible for the app users, Hilscher has worked with Wibu-Systems to create a dedi­cated license server app, the netFIELD App License Server, that can run on the same edge device as the actual appli­ca­tion. The license server app stays in the back­ground to commu­ni­cate with CodeMeter License Central, where licenses are created, rolled out, and managed auto­mat­i­cally. The end users simply select the avail­able licenses for the app they want and acti­vate them with a single click. 

In prac­tice: Reading out PROFINET network traffic 

Hilscher’s port­folio includes so-called tap apps. These are container-based apps that can passively read out the data shared between machines and indus­trial controllers on the shop floor via e.g., the PROFINET or EtherCAT protocol. This ability to read the data needs no inter­ven­tion in the controllers them­selves; all that is needed is one or two more passive compo­nents in the network, such as an edge gateway, dropped right into the flow of data with Hilscher’s netMIRROR and a mirror port on a PROFINET switch. The PROFINET tap app on the edge gateway uses the inte­grated Hilscher network card to tap into the PROFINET data flow and capture the data for later processing (e.g., for storing, visu­al­izing, adding alarms, or feeding it on into the user’s wider IT infra­struc­ture). 

Looking ahead

Wibu-Systems and Hilscher are working to make using the container tech­nology for digi­tal­izing and connecting indus­trial produc­tion as simple and safe as possible for all parties involved. This extends not just to the app users in facto­ries that can use the container tech­nology and edge computing to counter the double-punch impact of greater produc­tivity expec­ta­tions at a time of skilled labor shortage. It also includes the app publishers who want a simple, but secure oppor­tu­nity to bring their apps into smart manu­fac­turing envi­ron­ments they might not be familiar with – without worrying about the secu­rity of the intel­lec­tual prop­erty they had invested in their soft­ware. 

In the case of the netFIELD PROFINET Tap App, this means that the app is protected by the CodeMeter tech­nology in a way that it can be launched and run on the edge gateway, but would not produce any actu­ally mean­ingful data without a valid soft­ware-based license. This license is created by Wibu-Systems’ CodeMeter License Central, and the Tap App imme­di­ately starts deliv­ering usable data with the active license, hosted on the very same edge gateway using the so-called “App License Server Container”. No need for an external license server anymore! At the same time, the app is encrypted by CodeMeter and protected from snooping and fraud­u­lent use. 

Wibu-Systems and Hilscher are reaching out to other members of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance to create the Hilscher Flag­ship Store for the OI4 Commu­nity  as an open plat­form to help all providers and users along their way to truly digital and connected manu­fac­turing. 

Images: 

Image 1: The use case in prac­tice – Reading PROFINET network traffic

Image 2: How the Commu­nity App Store and the Open Oper­ator Cloud (e.g. netFIELD.io) coop­erate 

Image 3: The work­flow for uploading apps, with CodeMeter encryp­tion by Wibu-Systems inte­grated