FLAW3D: A Trojan-based Cyber Attack on the Physical Outcomes of Additive Manufacturing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a malicious Trojan attack on 3D printers that can compromise print quality and strength, highlighting cybersecurity vulnerabilities in additive manufacturing systems using microcontrollers.

Contribution

It introduces FLAW3D, a Trojan for AVR-based 3D printers, showing how it can evade detection and significantly degrade printed part quality.

Findings

Trojan can hide from programming tools

Print quality can be reduced by up to 50%

Trojan size is less than 1.7 kilobytes

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) systems such as 3D printers use inexpensive microcontrollers that rarely feature cybersecurity defenses. This is a risk, especially given the rising threat landscape within the larger digital manufacturing domain. In this work we demonstrate this risk by presenting the design and study of a malicious Trojan (the FLAW3D bootloader) for AVR-based Marlin-compatible 3D printers (>100 commercial models). We show that the Trojan can hide from programming tools, and even within tight design constraints (less than 1.7 kilobytes in size), it can compromise the quality of additively manufactured prints and reduce tensile strengths by up to 50%.