Proxima Robotics, founded in December 2017 as a spin-off of the 'E.Piaggio' Research Center at the University of Pisa, is an innovative company specializing in the development of modular plug-and-play software for mobile robots (AGV/AMR). Thanks to its solutions for autonomous navigation, fleet management, and integration with production and logistics environments, Proxima offers interfaces that are intuitively usable even by those without technical expertise.
The challenge that led them to seek IoTique's collaboration concerned the protection of their proprietary software: needing to ensure it could not be copied or installed on unauthorized devices, it became necessary to implement a highly secure licensing system. The choice fell on IoTique, which designed and implemented a custom license manager capable of treating each robot as a true IoT device, monitoring its power on/off and access based on the validity of the license.
The solution developed by IoTique is based on a unique digital identity for each robot, built through a cryptographic fingerprint derived from specific hardware and software parameters—such as CPU ID, MAC addresses, serial numbers, and internal configurations. In this way, if the software is copied to another robot, the fingerprint does not match and the license is invalid: in other words, the system instantly detects any cloning attempt.
To further strengthen security, each request from the robot to the license server includes a temporal element and the response is generated dynamically in relation to that value. This means that a response stored from a previous session becomes unusable at a later time, making replay attacks ineffective. Authentication tied to the precise moment thus ensures secure sessions, impervious to attempts to reload legitimate responses.
Thanks to this architecture, Proxima Robotics' software is robustly protected from unauthorized use: licenses are bound to the individual device and system integrity is guaranteed even in cases of attempted cloning or replay. Furthermore, the solution is designed to be scalable, easily extendable to new robot models and different environments without requiring complex interventions.
Finally, all controls related to license management operate in the background, without affecting the usability or performance of the user experience offered by Proxima's software. The collaboration between IoTique and Proxima Robotics has thus produced an advanced technological solution, designed to protect company know-how while maintaining the highest levels of efficiency, flexibility, and simplicity.
