Engineering Blog for High Performance Insights

PRODUCT SECURITY BRIEF: Why CRA Annex I fulfilment cannot be left to P&Ls and their engineering departments alone Annex I obligations attach to the manufacturer, a single legal entity, not to the P&L that happens to build the product. When divisions each interpret, implement and evidence Annex I on their own terms, the entity can accumulate several incompatible answers to questions the Regulation expects it to answer once. A market surveillance authority, a notified body or

PRODUCT SECURITY BRIEF. This article discusses the impact when manufacturers of CRA impacted products transition. The EU Cyber Resilience Act hangs every obligation on a single role, the manufacturer, and says almost nothing about what happens when the company holding that role is sold, split, rebranded or wound up. In operational technology, where assets outlive the companies that made them, that silence is a liability someone is already carrying. Usually it is the buyer, a

NEP SERVICES BRIEF: Nexus Engineering Partners offers services to ensure the success of your startup. In this article we explore those services and Nexus Engineering Partners (NEP) unique abilities to ensure startup success. The Debt that Founders Miss Industrial and safety-critical startups rarely fail because the core idea was wrong. They fail, or get repriced, because of decisions made in the first eighteen months by people optimising for the next demo rather than the ev

SECURITY BRIEF: CRA secure-by-default essential requirement through the lens of protocols that the device supports. Protocol security does not behave like a product property. Every industrial protocol that has added cryptographic protection — PROFINET Security Classes 2 and 3, CIP Security on EtherNet/IP, the OPC UA secure channel — protects a session, and a session needs two capable endpoints. The security a plant actually achieves is set by the least-capable peer in each re

OT SECURITY BRIEF: We look into the security aspects of the recently introduced i3X 1.0 (Industrial Interoperability eXchange) In June 2026, CESMII froze version 1.0 of i3X — the Industrial Information Interoperability eXchange — and shipped it with an implementation guide, an OpenAPI definition, a Python client, a conformance test suite and an MCP server. Forty-four technology providers have publicly aligned behind it. The specification is small, MIT-licensed, and by severa

NEP SERVICES BRIEF: In this brief we look at key aspects that organizations need to build out to ensure that they are fully ready to conform to CRA (Cybersecurity Resiliency Act) a sustainable way. CRA compliance is looming for vendors and operators alike from now for reporting and in 15 months for product compliance. The ramification for non-compliant products is that they will lose their CE mark if they had it before. More importantly, substantial monetary penalties are

SECURITY BRIEF: In this posting we explore the operational aspects of deploying resolution of exploitable vulnerabilities by manufacturers in the field. This article is a companion to "The Four Clocks for Manufacturers" This edition addresses the asset owner and operator: the entity running the estate at the operations level, on whom NIS2’s risk-management measures and Article 23 reporting clocks bind directly (where in scope), and whose engineering obligations run through

CRA Article 14 compliance for manufacturers

POSITION NOTE: Through EU legislated CRA (Cybersecurity Resiliency Act) scope is product level, efforts are made to assert compliance by way of systems architecture - will this assertion hold water? We explore this question. In late 2025, EtherCAT Technology Group consortium announced that its protocol meets the requirements of the EU Cyber Resilience Act. The initial statement, from the EtherCAT Technology Group, was carefully qualified — the protocol was said to meet IEC

SECURITY BRIEF: We look at the CRA impact to component vendors and what it means for OT device suppliers. The Cyber Resilience Act names one primary obligor: the manufacturer who places a product with digital elements on the EU market under its own name. Read narrowly, that puts the compliance burden on the device maker — the relay vendor, the RTU manufacturer, the drive OEM — and leaves the supply chain beneath them untouched. That narrow reading is already failing in pract

EXECUTIVE BRIEF: We look at required reporting becoming effective September 11, 2026 and what it means for the installed base. 24 h EARLY WARNING AFTER AWARENESS 72 h FULL NOTIFICATION VIA THE SRP €15M / 2.5% MAXIMUM FINE (GLOBAL TURNOVER) On 11 September 2026, the first operative obligation of the EU Cyber Resilience Act takes effect: manufacturers of products with digital elements sold into the EU must report actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe incidents to their

SECURITY BRIEF: Quantum computing will introduce cryptography challenges for Edge devices now and in the future. Here we look at this challenge relative to the OT environment. Quantum computing occupies an unusual position in the OT security conversation: it is simultaneously the reason current encryption will eventually fail and one of the technologies proposed to replace it. For OT and embedded environments, both sides of that story collide with the same structural problem

The European Union is advancing its approach to cybersecurity with the introduction of the Cybersecurity Resiliency Act. This legislation aims to strengthen the security of digital products and services across the EU, addressing the growing threats in an increasingly connected world. For organizations operating within or with the EU, understanding how to conduct a thorough risk assessment under this act is essential. This guide breaks down the key elements of the EU Cybersecu