Additive Manufacturing (AM) has been proven to be a significant development for production as well as become an attractive alternative manufacturing process compared with Subtractive Manufacturing (SM). This can be explained by the massive advantages of AM including mass customisation, less material wastage and ability to create prototypes. However, in order to make use of the AM process, firms, developers and designers require a virtual sharing platform, which can be used to trade designs and make the whole industry better off. This desire requires ways to protect the models and designs from digital thieves. Moreover, internal transactions of designs inside a single firm also require a significant level of security. So, this paper offers different ways of protecting both physical models and virtual designs. The solutions in this paper can be used to ensure the integrity of the physical products and virtual designs during different kinds of transactions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.