Monitoring Energy Consumption for Cyberattack Detection in Additive Manufacturing Systems

Additive manufacturing (AM) combined with the innovation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has made manufacturing faster and more convenient than ever. However, increased connectivity has exposed systems to potential security breaches. To address this vulnerability, this study presents a novel methodology to monitor AM systems using a side-channel monitoring framework based on a power meter. The power meter measures the energy consumption of every G/M-code command. Concurrently, a machine learning (ML) model is trained to predict energy consumption for each G/M-code command in the absence of cyberattacks. Consequently, when attacks occur in the system, the energy consumption prediction errors increase, indicating the presence of malicious activity. Our method is validated with three different print models to ensure robustness and generalizability. For all models, the prediction error increased by a factor of seven during attacks that altered the operating temperatures by 1 or 2 degrees. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in detecting attacks and anomalies in a timely manner.