14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers from the University at Buffalo, New York, has put together an attack on 3D printers that uses only a commodity smartphone.
Attackers only need to tweak their smartphone's software and place the device up to 30 centimeters away from a 3D printer.
The phone's sensors will collect electromagnetic and sound wave information coming from the 3D printer and its printing nozzle.
Attackers can reproduce 3D printed objects with +90% accuracy
After collecting the data on their phone, an attacker can later download it and reconstruct it into a 3D model.
Researchers say that during tests they managed to steal data from a 3D printer with 94 percent accuracy for simple objects, such as a door stop.
For more complex items like car parts or medical devices, the accuracy was lower, but above 90 percent, nonetheless.
Researchers also mention that the biggest portion of the data came from the electromagnetic waves recorded off the 3D printer's nozzle. These accounted for 80 percent of all the collected data.
Defensive measures for companies, 3D printer vendors
As 3D printing is expected to become a multi-billion dollar business, the researchers recommend that companies and 3D printer vendors implement defenses against their attack.
First off, 3D printers should be isolated and companies should not permit personnel to get near these devices with ease. Researchers noted that accuracy was high only when the smartphone was placed up to 30 centimeters away from a device. When the distance increased to 40 centimeters, the accuracy dropped to 66 percent.
Another way to improve 3D printer safety is for 3D printer vendors to develop software that alternates the 3D printer nozzle's speed. Varying the speed would wildly vary the electromagnetic and noise levels coming off the device, instead of the uniform levels that current devices give off. Scientists say that the bigger the speed, the harder is for smartphone sensors to pick up the necessary data.
The research paper named "My Smartphone Knows What You Print: Exploring Smartphone-Based Side-Channel Attacks Against 3D Printers," written by Xu et al., will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's 23rd annual Conference on Computer and Communications Security in October in Austria.