Securing the Additive Manufacturing Process Chain

Additive Manufacturing (AM), commonly known as 3D printing, is a manufacturing process that creates parts layer by layer. This innovative technique is increasingly utilized across various applications, ranging from rapid prototyping to the production of safety-critical components. Today, the process chain has become digitalized and distributed across multiple organizations, allowing for highly efficient manufacturing. Consequently, this has created a need for security measures to protect these process chains against attacks. For this reason, we propose a holistic concept for securing the AM process chain. We have developed a comprehensive model for the process chain that encompasses all relevant steps and stakeholders involved. By mapping common proactive and reactive security measures specific to AM to these stakeholders, we derive the first holistic security concept that fully covers the process chain. Our primary focus is protecting against sabotage and intellectual property theft while ensuring traceability throughout the process. In particular, we introduce a custom file format for secure exchanges of design and manufacturing files, a Public Key Infrastructure for managing trust between stakeholders, and describe supplemental measures, like side-channel analysis and watermarks, to specifically secure the manufacturing step and final part. To demonstrate the feasibility and usability of our security concept, we have implemented a proof of concept based on widely used open-source 3D printing applications.