UC Irvine

Cyber-physical additive manufacturing systems consists of tight integration of cyber and physical domains. This results in new cross-domain vulnerabilities that poses unique security challenges. One of the challenges is preventing confidentiality breach due to physical-to-cyber domain attacks, where attackers can use physical analog emissions to steal the cyber-domain information. This information theft is based on the idea that an attacker can accurately estimate the relation between the analog emissions (acoustics, power, electromagnetic emissions, etc.,) and the cyber-domain data (such as G-code). To obstruct this estimation process, it is crucial to generate computer aided manufacturing tools, such as slicing and tool-path generation algorithms, that are aware of these information leakage. In this thesis, we present a novel methodology that uses mutual information as a metric to quantize the information leakage from the side-channels, and demonstrates how various design variables (such as object orientation, nozzle velocity, etc.,) can be used in an optimization algorithm to minimize the information leakage. Our methodology integrates this leakage aware algorithms to the state-of-the-art slicing tools and achieves 24.76% average drop in the information leakage through acoustic side-channel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that demonstrates the idea of generating information leakage aware computer aided manufacturing tools for protecting the confidentiality of the manufacturing system.