back to article Scientists' sneaky smartphone software steals 3D printer designs

Uni eggheads have stolen 3D printing designs by monitoring the acoustic and electromagnetic signatures of a printer in action using a nearby smartphone. The team, based at the University at Buffalo in New York state, used a Nexus 5 to eavesdrop on production. The mobe uses a Qualcomm WCD9320 audio codec and Asahi Kasei 3D …

  1. Little Mouse

    Interesting but impractical

    Reminds me of the CRT monitor "hack" of the last millennium. Because CRT pixels were lit up one at a time, the boffins involved showed that you could "see" what was on someone's out-of-sight screen just by recording and analysing the light levels in the same room.

    Simple in principle, but required very fast sampling rates and a pretty high level of precision & accuracy.

    1. Black Betty

      Re: Interesting but impractical

      Except the offspring of that technology now allows us to use the scattered light of a laser pointer to see around the corner into the whole bloody room. http://phys.org/news/2015-12-amazing-camera-corners-video.html

      OR

      Slow a pulse of light to a crawl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fSqFWcb4rE

      No. 1 is entirely practical, and 2 is so damned cool it needs no reason. Just a repeat with a mirror under the cap to catch the beam reflecting back on itself.

      As for what's on the screen, an advanced hobbyist level device has, for many, many years, been perfectly capable of reproducing a nearby screen's contents from the EM emissions of its yoke and electron gun with sufficient fidelity, that special fuzzy fonts were designed to counteract it.

  2. W4YBO

    Sounds like the problem could be solved with a little μ-metal and cable shielding and vibration isolation.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Or...

      ...with a hammer, applied to the smartphone in question.

      1. MrDamage Silver badge

        Re: Or...

        ...with a hammer, applied to the smartphone owner in question.

        FTFY

  3. Neil Barnes Silver badge
    Pirate

    Well, the traditional approach

    would be to buy the opposition's part once it's available and then take it to bits to see how it ticks.

    In my job, most of what happens in the additive printing shops is SLS and SLA prototypes, to see if the 3-d software knew what it was talking about. The manufacture is in a plastics factory in the far east.

  4. DropBear

    Hopefully, nobody will pick up the unknown smartphone and ask "who forgot this here?" during the day and a half it takes the printer to print anything more meaningful than a keychain-sized Yoda head. And the phone's battery won't go flat either after the first two hours, seeing as how it's crunching numbers at full tilt. Nor will anyone find it surprising that, due to the same, the phone is burning hot.

  5. phuzz Silver badge

    This would be more useful if it could detect when the printer was starting to mess up and turn the object into a spaghetti of plastic like this.

    Then at least you could get a notification to stop the printer and go through all the calibration again, in the hope that another attempt would work better.

  6. Ralph B

    Just because you (theoretically) can ...

    Just because you (theoretically) can, doesn't mean you should.

    Why don't they do something useful like working out how to create MP3s from a photograph of a vinyl LP? And don't tell that the resolution of the iPhone 7 camera is not up to the job. I'm upset enough at the loss of the headphone jack.

  7. Cynic_999

    Is there a problem associated with this solution?

    Yes, I can see what it does & how it works, but what's the point? I can't think of any plausible situation in which this approach would work but where the required information could not be obtained far more easily and more accurately by other means. In most cases you could simply photograph the resulting plastic part from a few angles and re-model it. If the project were so super-secret that the printed parts were kept hidden, I can't see a 3rd party's mobile phone being permitted to be left a few cm from the printer. In any case, it is trivially defeated if it were ever to become a threat.

  8. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Whatever Top Secret product that they're making...

    ...why not just buy one?

    I guess this spying technique is potentially applicable to the intersection of 3D Printed, non-critical dimensions, somebody's critical Trade Secret, but they give factory tours.

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