Engineering news
The market for additive manufacturing, commonly known as 3D printing, is worth more than $5bn, but there’s a potentially serious flaw. Using it requires manufacturers to create digital CAD files, which can be copied, stolen or hacked – allowing thieves to make illegal copies of the product that are indistinguishable from the originals. A 2014 report by analysts at Gartner predicted that by 2018, 3D printing would result in the loss of $100bn a year in intellectual property worldwide.
Until now, most manufacturers have used cybersecurity techniques to prevent this kind of theft, but there’s a more robust potential solution. A group of researchers at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering has discovered a way of embedding hidden flaws in a CAD file to prevent this kind of intellectual property theft.
“Cybersecurity tools can be applied as usual to make the files and cloud secure; however, in case the design files are stolen, there is nothing in the designs to deter printing a high-quality component,” said Nikhil Gupta, a materials researcher who led the work. “The new approach is designed to provide an advantage in this scenario and to make printing high-quality parts from stolen files difficult."
The study published this week in Materials and Design describes how intentionally induced defects can disappear if a file is printed under exactly the right conditions. This would, in theory, enable manufacturers to create product designs that would only work properly when built using their own systems.
Aspects of the printing process such as file resolution, printing direction and printer resolution affected whether the flaws were activated or neutralised. These security features could be intentional holes in something that’s supposed to be solid, or minor tweaks that make an item break more easily.
“The range of security feature designs demonstrated in this work can provide great flexibility to application engineers in terms of how to disguise these flaws easily in a complex shaped part,” said doctoral student Fei Chen, who worked on the project alongside Gupta. “Most industrial components manufactured using 3D printing have complex designs to justify the use of 3D printing, which further helps in embedding these features without detection.”