ProCloud3D: Protected Cloud Slicing for Industrial 3D Printing

As the digital revolution is spreading through our world’s globalized economy, its repercussions are making themselves felt across the manufacturing sector. Enormous potential still lies ready to be seized in nations and economies sharing data, information, and knowledge across physical and cultural borders. Researchers and practitioners are increasingly interested in the role that flexible products, manufacturing technology, and services will play in international cooperation. By establishing shared research and learning hubs and model factories, they are creating new foundations for lasting and constructive economic cooperation.

“Intelligent Manufacturing (Industry 4.0) and Smart Services” represents a key research focus contributing to the strategic globalization of science and research, to the “China strategy 2015 to 2020” of Germany’s Ministry of Education and Research, and to the Ministry’s umbrella initiative “Innovations for Tomorrow’s Production, Services, and Work”. They all intend to bolster the technological competences, intensify the scientific dialogue between Germany and China, and expand the internationalization of teaching and research. The promotion of Sino-German partnerships is meant to create new impulses enabling companies and entire industries to respond proactively to changes in the global markets and to actively shape the momentous changes required in economies around the world.

Industrial additive manufacturing (AM) enables manufacturing enterprises to respond immediately to changing demand in their global competition. The technology has long left behind being limited to making metal or plastic prototypes and is increasingly being used to realize a new industrial paradigm: custom serial production.

The design data of 3D printed products is a particularly sensitive and valuable asset, as access to a digital model is all that is needed to produce a perfect physical copy of a product. Beyond this issue of outright product piracy, designers will require means to ensure that only the actually ordered number of their products is being produced, and produced to their actual specifications.

This project group intends to develop a cloud-based platform that can handle all steps required for preparing industrial 3D printing processes in a fully automated, distributed, and encryption-protected form. Using the platform, the factories offering additive manufacturing services could be provided with the production designs and data their machines need in real time, while the protected digital models never need to be handed over permanently or in full to the manufacturing service provider.

The proposed platform will include a web frontend, a technology database with process parameters, a post-processor generating the machine code, the required hardware and software interfaces enabling the platform to communicate with the 3D printers on the ground, and a holistic security infrastructure providing protection for the entire solution.

The platform would create a new value chain held together by a complete license management system that authorizes, manages, and monitors all required data transfer and other process steps between the parties involved. A live demonstration system is being constructed to provide a tangible impression of the entire workflow from the digital 3D model via the cloud to the additive manufacturing provider.

The project taps into several of the unique capabilities of the 3D printing technology to overcome the potential end user’s reservations and encourage the use of external providers of industrial 3D printing services by allaying their concerns about the safety of their intellectual property and the viability of their competitive standing.

The overarching goal of the ProCloud3D project was to develop and test a cloud-based platform. On this platform all steps for preparing and carrying out a 3D printing process were to be mapped in a decentralized and encrypted manner.

In order to achieve this goal, a new type of platform was developed. It allows the production data to be generated layer by layer, based on material-specific process parameters, and to be passed on to the 3D printer in a protected manner. To do so, the layer data generated was prepared in such a way that it can be made available for various 3D printers, including an overarching security infrastructure. This created a protected value chain whose overarching license management authorizes, controls, and monitors all the necessary data transfer and process steps between the parties involved. Two national demonstrators were used to show how customers can authorize service providers to manufacture components using additive manufacturing while safeguarding their corporate interests and unique selling points.

The overall project result of ProCloud3D for Wibu-Systems was the development of a consistent, real-time end-to-end encryption of data along the entire data and process chain of additive manufacturing, including securing data exchange, managing digital rights and controlling the number of printed parts in production. The following components were developed for this purpose:

• Digital rights management (DRM)
• Licensing model for data and software based on CodeMeter from Wibu-Systems
• Improved software protection measures against reverse engineering
• Integration concepts for license management and the digital DRM system in the platform
• Protection concept for streaming data including risk analysis
• Encryption libraries for the cloud platform and for the 3D printers that work with a tamper-proof counter
• Integration of digital certificates for the authentication of the 3D printer

By implementing the ProCloud3D project, product improvements were achieved in the following areas, among others:

• Improvements in CodeMeter Core API, in the integration of libcurl as well as in the detection of the environment for features that can be used to bind the licenses.
• Improvements in AxProtector JavaScript, in the protection of .NET applications and in AxProtector Python.
• Adjustments to the CodeMeter License Central gateways and WebDepot for the distribution of cryptographic keys, digital certificates and licenses, as well as CodeMeter Runtime and CodeMeter Embedded for supporting the hardware platforms and in the CodeMeter firmware.
• Development Integration DRM: Tools for generating digital certificates have been improved. The protection tools CodeMeter API and AxProtector have been integrated.
• Protection in Docker environments has been improved.

The project results will enable new business models on the 3D printing market in the future that are currently not possible or only possible with loss of intellectual property and loss of control in production.

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