Cybersecurity assurance in the emerging manufacturing-as-a-service (MaaS) paradigm: A lesson from the video streaming industry

The coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak has incapacitated physical supply chains of various industrial sectors. This has been a call for attention to rethinking innovative methods to improve supply chain resilience. Emerging manufacturing technologies like additive/hybrid manufacturing are enabling small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to transform into cybermanufacturing kiosks that deliver manufacturing-as-a-service by digitizing much of the manufacturing workflow (design, communication, and manufacturing). This transformation is causing a paradigm shift in which major producers and original equipment manufacturers can outsource manufacturing of components to distributed SMEs located near the point of need. The increasing reliance on a digital thread would reduce the burden of resiliency required from the physical supply chains. Although digital threads are reducing the burden on the physical supply chains, they introduce a new class of cyber-resilience requirements, chiefly in ensuring the integrity of the designs and other intellectual properties shared across the digital thread. A novel design-sharing scheme for the digital thread based on video streaming is introduced herein to address the issue of IP theft and tampering. The potential of design-sharing schemes for the improvement of the cyberresilience of digital supply chains is discussed.