Genuinity Signatures: Designing Signatures for Verifying 3D Object Genuinity

3D computer graphics models and digitally-controlled manufacturing have come together to enable the design, visualization, simulation, and automated creation of complex 3D objects. In our work, we propose and implement a framework for designing computer graphics objects and digitally manufacturing them such that no adversary can make imitations or counterfeit copies of the physical object, even if the adversary has a large number of original copies of the object, knowledge of the original object design, and has manufacturing precision that is comparable to or superior to that of the legitimate creator of the object. Our approach is to design and embed a signature on the surface of the object which acts as a certificate of genuinity of the object. The signature is detectable by a signature-reading device, based on methods in computer graphics and computer vision, which contains some of the secret information that was used when marking the physical object. Further, the compromise of a signature-reading device by an adversary who is able to extract all its secrets, does not enable the adversary to create counterfeit objects that fool other readers, thereby still enabling reliable copy detection. We implemented a prototype of our scheme end-to-end, including the production of the physical object and the genuinity-testing device.