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Main Authors: Hasan, Md Mahbub, Sternhagen, Marcus, Roy, Krishna Chandra
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00384
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author Hasan, Md Mahbub
Sternhagen, Marcus
Roy, Krishna Chandra
author_facet Hasan, Md Mahbub
Sternhagen, Marcus
Roy, Krishna Chandra
contents Additive manufacturing (AM) is rapidly integrating into critical sectors such as aerospace, automotive, and healthcare. However, this cyber-physical convergence introduces new attack surfaces, especially at the interface between computer-aided design (CAD) and machine execution layers. In this work, we investigate targeted cyberattacks on two widely used fused deposition modeling (FDM) systems, Creality's flagship model K1 Max, and Ender 3. Our threat model is a multi-layered Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) intrusion, where the adversary intercepts and manipulates G-code files during upload from the user interface to the printer firmware. The MitM intrusion chain enables several stealthy sabotage scenarios. These attacks remain undetectable by conventional slicer software or runtime interfaces, resulting in structurally defective yet externally plausible printed parts. To counter these stealthy threats, we propose an unsupervised Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that analyzes structured machine logs generated during live printing. Our defense mechanism uses a frozen Transformer-based encoder (a BERT variant) to extract semantic representations of system behavior, followed by a contrastively trained projection head that learns anomaly-sensitive embeddings. Later, a clustering-based approach and a self-attention autoencoder are used for classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively distinguishes between benign and compromised executions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_00384
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Engineering Attack Vectors and Detecting Anomalies in Additive Manufacturing
Hasan, Md Mahbub
Sternhagen, Marcus
Roy, Krishna Chandra
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Additive manufacturing (AM) is rapidly integrating into critical sectors such as aerospace, automotive, and healthcare. However, this cyber-physical convergence introduces new attack surfaces, especially at the interface between computer-aided design (CAD) and machine execution layers. In this work, we investigate targeted cyberattacks on two widely used fused deposition modeling (FDM) systems, Creality's flagship model K1 Max, and Ender 3. Our threat model is a multi-layered Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) intrusion, where the adversary intercepts and manipulates G-code files during upload from the user interface to the printer firmware. The MitM intrusion chain enables several stealthy sabotage scenarios. These attacks remain undetectable by conventional slicer software or runtime interfaces, resulting in structurally defective yet externally plausible printed parts. To counter these stealthy threats, we propose an unsupervised Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that analyzes structured machine logs generated during live printing. Our defense mechanism uses a frozen Transformer-based encoder (a BERT variant) to extract semantic representations of system behavior, followed by a contrastively trained projection head that learns anomaly-sensitive embeddings. Later, a clustering-based approach and a self-attention autoencoder are used for classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively distinguishes between benign and compromised executions.
title Engineering Attack Vectors and Detecting Anomalies in Additive Manufacturing
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00384