Accesses to the monitoring service 24 require an authentication process 34 for the third level 22, for which purpose the key management 70 communicates with the monitoring service 24. The hot code swap service 60 is likewise associated with the third level 22 (not shown in
In addition to accesses to the hardware level 36 and to the operating system 46, the key management can also carry out an authentication process 34 for the user program 64, whereby, for example, blocked parts of the user program 64 can be executed.
Depending on the importance of the different functional blocks 20, 24, 28, 32, 60, a different safety level can be generated by the breakdown of the PLC 10 into different levels 18, 22, 26, 30 and to the association of different functional blocks 20, 24, 28, 32, 60 with these levels. In this respect, a weighing up can be made between the required effort and the required safety level.