NFTs For 3D Models: Sustaining Ownership In Industry 4.0
Date
2022-04-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine
Abstract
Digital manufacturing (DM) is actively adopted to the production lifecycles of a variety of critical industries, and this rapid growth has resulted in exponential increase of 3D computer-aided design (CAD) models. Unfortunately, counterfeiting of intellectual property becomes a prominent threat as many 3D designs are accessible online, combined with the proliferation of cheap consumer 3D printers that enable malicious actors to produce non-authentic parts. State-of-the-art techniques to secure manufacturing processes mostly rely on watermarking, which embeds hidden information inside CAD models to prove ownership and authenticity. Nevertheless, such techniques tamper with the model itself, while existing attacks allow removing such watermarks altogether. To address these shortcomings, we integrate signal processing and cryptographic techniques and describe a tailored solution for CAD model ownership and supply chain management. Our approach generates unique identifiers for 3D designs using frequency-domain transforms and employs non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that persist on public distributed ledgers. Our NFTs are implemented on the Ethereum blockchain using smart contracts and their functionality is twofold: (a) authenticate the owner of a CAD model, and (b) enable ownership transfer. To validate our technique, we deployed our smart contract on Ethereum's proof-of-work Ropsten network and demonstrated the applicability of our methodology.
Description
© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. This article was originally published in IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/MCE.2022.3164221.
Keywords
3D Printing, Blockchain, Digital Manufacturing, IP Theft, Non-Fungible Tokens, Smart Contracts
Citation
D. Mouris and N. G. Tsoutsos, "NFTs For 3D Models: Sustaining Ownership In Industry 4.0," in IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, doi: 10.1109/MCE.2022.3164221.