NFTs for 3D Models: Sustaining Ownership in Industry 4.0

Digital manufacturing is actively adopted to the production lifecycles of a variety of critical industries, and this rapid growth has resulted in exponential increase of 3D computer-aided design (CAD) models. Unfortunately, counterfeiting of intellectual property becomes a prominent threat as many 3D designs are accessible online, combined with the proliferation of cheap consumer 3D printers that enable malicious actors to produce nonauthentic parts. State-of-the-art techniques to secure manufacturing processes mostly rely on watermarking, which embeds hidden information inside CAD models to prove the ownership and authenticity. Nevertheless, such techniques tamper with the model itself, while existing attacks allow removing such watermarks altogether. To address these shortcomings, we integrate signal processing and cryptographic techniques, and describe a tailored solution for CAD model ownership and supply chain management. Our approach generates unique identifiers for 3D designs using frequency-domain transforms and employs non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that persist on public distributed ledgers. Our NFTs are implemented on the Ethereum blockchain using smart contracts and their functionality is twofold: 1) authenticate the owner of a CAD model, and 2) enable ownership transfer. To validate our technique, we deployed our smart contract on Ethereum's proof-of-work Ropsten network and demonstrated the applicability of our methodology.