Industrial software lives in the strictest licensing environment there is: networks that are isolated by design, machines that run for twenty years, and customers who will not — and under their security policies often cannot — let production equipment talk to the internet.
Air-gapped is the requirement, not the edge case
OT security practice, and standards like IEC 62443, push plant networks toward hard segmentation: production cells behind firewalls, or with no route out at all. Commissioning engineers work on customer sites where “can I get online for the activation?” is not a question worth asking. A licensing scheme that phones home is broken on arrival here. A KeyNub verifies locally — a challenge–response against keys held in a secure element on the dongle — and never needs a server, a grace period or an exemption in the firewall rules.
Machines outlive activation servers
A machine commissioned this year will still be producing in 2046. Will the activation server be answering then? Will the vendor behind it? Because verification is local, a KeyNub in the cabinet keeps working regardless — including regardless of us. Nothing about your customer’s installation depends on KeyNub infrastructure staying up, which is a sentence worth being able to say in a twenty-year support contract.
Engineering seats and runtime stations
The two licensing models of this industry map cleanly onto hardware. An engineering tool follows the engineer: a dongle is a floating license you can hold in your hand, moved from the office workstation to the commissioning laptop without deactivation ceremonies or a license server. A runtime — HMI, SCADA, motion, vision — is licensed per station and sized by tags, axes or cameras: those tiers are records on the dongle, upgraded in the field with your vendor authorisation when the plant expands.
Legacy toolchains are first-class here
This is the industry where software from 2003 still runs production lines, and we treat that as a fact rather than a problem. KeyNub has maintained, documented bindings with runnable samples for Visual Basic 6 (as a COM object), twinBASIC, VBA and Delphi alongside the C/C++ and .NET everyone expects. If your HMI was built in 1998 and still sells, you can protect it without rewriting it.
Nothing to install on a locked-down panel PC
Panel PCs and IPCs run allowlisted, validated images where “install this license runtime as administrator” is somewhere between unwelcome and impossible. A KeyNub enumerates as a standard HID device — no driver, no background service — and the SDK is one library beside your executable. For Linux-based IPCs the SDK ships the one udev rule you need.
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