ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 11 -- United States Patent no. 12,549,339, issued on Feb. 10, was assigned to Siemens AG (Munich).
"Encryption of program instructions in a numerical control device" was invented by Jochen Bretschneider (Owingen, Germany), Lars Immenroth (Zwickau, Germany) and Andre Vieweg (Chemnitz, Germany).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In a method for operating a numerical control device for controlling a production machine for producing a workpiece, program instructions generated by CAM software are encrypted with a first encryption key to generate first encrypted program instructions and the first encrypted program instructions are decrypted with a first decryption key to generate f...