My Smartphone Knows What You Print: Exploring Smartphone-based Side-channel Attacks Against 3D Printers

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, has been increasingly applied to fabricate highly intellectual property (IP) sensitive products. However, the related IP protection issues in 3D printers are still largely underexplored. On the other hand, smartphones are equipped with rich onboard sensors and have been applied to pervasive mobile surveillance in many applications. These facts raise one critical question: is it possible that smartphones access the side-channel signals of 3D printer and then hack the IP information? To answer this, we perform an end-to-end study on exploring smartphone-based side-channel attacks against 3D printers. Specifically, we formulate the problem of the IP side-channel attack in 3D printing. Then, we investigate the possible acoustic and magnetic side-channel attacks using the smartphone built-in sensors. Moreover, we explore a magnetic-enhanced side-channel attack model to accurately deduce the vital directional operations of 3D printer. Experimental results show that by exploiting the side-channel signals collected by smartphones, we can successfully reconstruct the physical prints and their G-code with Mean Tendency Error of 5.87% on regular designs and 9.67% on complex designs, respectively. Our study demonstrates this new and practical smartphone-based side channel attack on compromising IP information during 3D printing.