Associate professor in CSSE earns $800K NSF award to safeguard 3D printing intellectual property
Published: Oct 1, 2025 1:00 PM
By Joe McAdory
Companies designing intricate parts face a costly dilemma: purchasing expensive 3D printing equipment or sharing valuable designs with manufacturers who could potentially steal their intellectual property.
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering Associate Professor Mark Yampolskiy has a solution. His digital watermarking system embeds unremovable identifiers into 3D printing design files, allowing inventors to track which of the manufacturers who was asked for a quote violated the trust by leaking or infringing upon the shared design.
Together with his collaborators, Nikhil Gupta (professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at New York University) and Moti Yung (distinguished research scientist at Google, LLC and a senior research faculty at Columbia University), Yampolskiy was awarded a three-year, $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project, “Robust Watermarking for Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS) Business Model,” designed to advance security in the rapidly growing additive manufacturing industry.
“The big problem is that whenever you are asking a manufacturing business for a quote, you need to share your most precious Intellectual Property (IP) – digital design of a part,” said Yampolskiy, the project’s principal investigator. “If you want to find the best quote, you must share it with multiple manufacturers. Should you realize that this design was leaked, somebody had stolen and sold it on dark web or something similar, how can you know who was responsible?”
Yampolskiy, who will be a visiting research fellow at Tel Aviv’s Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center in 2026, said the issue has become a major barrier in the multibillion-dollar additive manufacturing industry, which uses 3D printers to produce complex components for aerospace, biomedical and industrial applications. He believes his “robust design watermarking” technique can alleviate concerns of design owners, thus allowing customers to outsource production to providers offering the best conditions, such as manufacturing cost, delivery time and quality without investing in expensive equipment themselves.
Yampolskiy's solution works by sharing lower-quality versions of designs during the quote request phase. These files may result in parts with distorted shapes, loose fits or reduced mechanical strength, which lessens their value for theft. Only selected manufacturers will be able to access high-quality design. The files also contain digital and physical watermarks that can be traced back to the specific manufacturer. Removal of these watermarks will make it impossible to obtain the high-quality design, which makes these watermarks robust.
The result: quality restoration instructions available only to the contracted manufacturer. Any attempt to tamper with the watermark disables this restoration’s capability, which significantly reduces incentive for the theft.
The collaborators’ desired research impact extends beyond catching intellectual property thieves.
“There will be more trust in outsourcing in manufacturing so that this industry will grow much faster, supporting also creation of new businesses focused on innovative designs,” Yampolskiy said.
Media Contact: , jem0040@auburn.edu, 334.844.3447
Can digital watermarking keep 3D intellectual property safe? CSSE Associate Professor Mark Yampolskiy and collaborators are researching how this can happen.
