ADS

The Automation Device Specification (ADS) is a proprietary communication protocol developed by Beckhoff. It is designed for high throughput and portability over different transport protocols (e.g. TCP or serial). ADS was not designed with security in mind and does not include cryptographic operations because of their negative effect on performance and throughput.

It is recommended to use ADS only in secured environments or to use appropriately secured transport channels.

For ADS there are currently two TCP transport channels that support encryption:

• ADS-over-MQTT
• Secure ADS