With recent advancements in 3D printing and additive manufacturing, there is a greater interest in using Controller Area Network (CAN) for the support of their embedded systems. With this increase in use, there is a growing need to identify any potential vulnerabilities of this hardware, which is what Associate Professor Himanshu Thapliyal and graduate student Tyler Cultice have been researching.
Thapliyal and Cultice have put together two types of hardware and software attacks on data modules within a commercial 3D printer. Their research looked at a hardware attack of a CAN-based commercial 3D printers via reconstructing the model during initialization. Additionally, they created a temperature spoofing attack on the printer’s software.
The duo concluded that using CAN 3D printers will require a commitment to designing strong security, reliability, and privacy systems for commercial and personal printing farms. Their research was published in February’s IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine.