Embedded Obfuscated Barcodes for Identification of Genuine Additive Manufactured Parts
Abstract Additive manufacturing (AM) has been adopted for manufacturing complex shaped highly customized components for aerospace, automotive, and medical fields, where intellectual property protection and counterfeit detection are major concerns. New technologies such as Blockchain have been promising in supply chain authentication. However, AM due to layer-by-layer manufacturing process provides opportunities of embedding information inside the part during manufacturing, which has been explored recently to embed identification codes inside the parts. The present work studies the possibility of printing a barcode inside the additively manufactured part and develops a scheme to obfuscate the code design to read differently from different directions to enhance the security and protect the intellectual property. The embedded three-dimensional codes are scanned using a micro-CT scan. This scheme of embedded obfuscated codes proves to be a highly customizable and efficient process while securing product design files.