Discontinuation of PDF and TXT Advisory Formats

In the article "New Siemens Security Advisory (SSA) Formats" which was published on 2022-04-20, the shortcomings of the PDF and TXT formats for security advisories were laid out and the introduction of the HTML format (for human readers) and CSAF (machine readable) was explained.

As expected, the CSAF format is now the dominant standard for machine readable advisories, and the HTML format provides much better readability for humans due to interactive content like product grouping. Due to these improvements, the download rates of PDF and TXT advisories decreased further.
Therefore, we phased out the TXT advisories in June 2025 already and we subsequently stopped publishing PDF advisories in November 2025.
Further developments regarding the publication of vulnerability information in Siemens products will be the adoption of CSAF 2.1 format in the short term and the introduction of an Application Programming Interface (API) in a long term perspective.