The story
A root of trust small enough to sit beside every device a site already has.
Most of the devices on a site will never be replaced to make them secure. A meter on an RS-485 bus is expected to last twenty years; a camera bought five years ago still works; a Zigbee sensor in a ceiling will not be reflashed by anyone. Securing a site therefore means bringing these devices inside a trust model without asking them to change.
Gateways that bridge old protocols exist in every catalogue, and they share one omission: they forward what they hear and vouch for none of it. A reading crosses the bridge and loses its history; a write crosses the other way and gains an authority it never had.
Furcate hardware starts from the silicon. Every tier holds a key its firmware can use but never read, and takes its name from that key alone. That gives an inexpensive leaf what is usually reserved for a secure element: an identity nobody can copy, an identity for each device attached to it, and a signature on everything it reports.
Each decision in the range follows from where it sits. DIN-rail leaves, because meters and controllers live in panels. Power over Ethernet, because a ceiling or a pole has a cable and no socket. An interlock table held on the leaf, because the moment a network fails is the moment a valve most needs to know its limits. Video belongs to Furcate Hub, because a leaf cannot carry other cameras' streams and redaction needs an accelerator.
The hardware is one part of an architecture. Leaves report to a Node, Nodes and Hubs report to a site, and Praecise operates sites together. The firmware and reference designs are open, so anyone can build a leaf, and the hardware Praecise builds is certified and supported for production.
