Engineers Devise a Way to Prevent Manufacturing Shutdowns During Cyberattacks
A professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and a team of Rutgers students are proposing a means to defend manufacturers from cyberattacks – and ensure the uninterrupted production of mission-critical national security and infrastructure parts.
Rajiv Malhotra, an associate professor in the Rutgers School of Engineering Department of Mechanical and Aerospace engineering, proposes using a digital twin framework to improve manufacturing resilience from cyberattacks.
In an article coauthored by Malhotra and published in the Journal of Manufacturing Systems, the professor and a team of Rutgers students and other researchers outside of the university discuss creating geometric and process digital twins – virtual replicas of physical processes or systems – to ensure resilience in additive manufacturing against attacks that may damage parts and hobble production, potentially threatening national security. Their work also addresses a foundational challenge in scalability resulting from constraints on manufacturing, materials, cost, and supply chain that has previously impeded resilience.
By relying on digitalization and connectivity, modern manufacturing can leave production vulnerable to malware attacks, ones that can compromise the functionality of an additive manufacturing part by altering its geometry or by inserting small, hard-to-detect local defects. Such cyberattacks hampering the production of everything from electronics and spacecraft to biomedical devices and cars has broad-ranging impacts negatively on societal well-being, economic stability and national security, the authors wrote.
“Traditional approaches for addressing the threat of cyberattacks rely on reporting and detecting the issue and shutting production down, while plugging the gaps in the cyber layer before production starts again, which can take weeks with no guarantees that the next attack won’t exploit some other gap in the cyber layer,” Malhotra said.
Creating resilience against such attacks ensures uninterrupted production of high-quality mission-critical parts even though harm from ongoing attacks in the cyber layer has yet to be fixed, he said.
The digital twins “work in tandem to create resilience at key points of the manufacturing digital chain where cyberphysical attacks might occur – such as the part model, machine firmware and the process plan generation software,” Malhotra said.
Specifically, the digital twin framework enables the rapid repair of attacked digital geometries without the challenges of repeated fabrication-printing-correction cycles, and disrupts formation of local defects, even when the attack and the alteration it makes is not known explicitly.
“This scalability to unknown attacks is critical,” Malhotra said.
Even as the research is continuing, Malhotra and the team are working with industry partners to commercialize their framework for use in manufacturing facilities.
Moving forward, Malhotra said the team will expand their research to include attacks on sensor signals, machine and human safety and the use of hybrid manufacturing systems to provide more holistic relief from defects created by attacks.
“We are also expanding this approach towards expeditionary manufacturing for defense and space applications – and are also very interested in collaborating with other industry partners beyond our current scope,” he added.
The team, including mechanical and aerospace engineering doctoral students Jeremy Cleeman and Anandkumar Patel, and electrical and computer engineering major Adrian Jackson, began work on this ongoing project in September 2024 with support from funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Other collaborators and co-authors include Hongyi Xu from the University of Connecticut, Chenhui Shao of the University of Michigan and the Oak Ridge National Lab’s Thomas Feldhausen.
