Sensor Data Protection Through Integration of Blockchain and Camouflaged Encryption in Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Systems

The advancement of sensing technology enables efficient data collection from manufacturing systems for monitoring and control. Furthermore, with the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and information technologies, more and more manufacturing systems become cyber-enabled, facilitating real-time data sharing and information exchange, which significantly improves the flexibility and efficiency of manufacturing systems. However, the cyber-enabled environment may pose the collected sensor data with high risks of cyber-physical attacks during the data and information sharing. Specifically, cyber-physical attacks could target the manufacturing process and/or the data transmission process to maliciously tamper the sensor data, resulting in false alarms or failures in anomaly detection in monitoring. In addition, cyber-physical attacks may also enable illegal data access without authorization and cause the leakage of key product/process information. Therefore, it becomes critical to develop an effective approach to protect data from these attacks so that the cyber-physical security of the manufacturing systems can be assured in the cyber-enabled environment. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes an integrative blockchain-enabled data protection method by leveraging camouflaged asymmetry encryption. A real-world case study that protects the cyber-physical security of collected sensor data in additive manufacturing is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that malicious tampering could be detected in a relatively short time (less than 0.05 ms), and the risk of unauthorized data access is significantly reduced as well.