Characteristic Aspects of Additive Manufacturing Security From Security Awareness Perspectives

Additive manufacturing (AM) is expected to become an established manufacturing technology in the near future. The growing penetration of AM at manufacturers across the world and the dependence of this technology on computerization have already raised security concerns, some of which have been proven experimentally. In this paper, we analyze the AM Security from three awareness perspectives: exposure to an attack, evaluation of the system, and potential liability for a successful attack. For each of these perspectives, we first introduce the conceptual background and then provide the analysis of its applicability to AM, highlighting its distinctiveness from closely related subtractive manufacturing (SM). Our analysis shows that, while there is a certain overlap between AM and SM security, the AM requires a separate and unique perspective and approach undertaken by experts with relevant domain expertise.