A Grid-Based Secure Product Data Exchange for Cloud-Based Collaborative Design

Abstract

As a new design and manufacture paradigm, Cloud-Based Collaborative Design (CBCD) has motivated designers to outsource their product data and design computation onto the cloud service. Despite non-negligible benefits of CBCD, there are potential security threats for the outsourced product data, such as intellectual property, design intentions and private identity, which has become an interest point. This paper presents a novel secure product data exchange (PDE) in the processes of CBCD. Different from general cloud security mechanism, our method is content-based. We first show an outline of the collaborative scenario to describe the architecture of the proposed secure CBCD, in which a security mechanism is combined with the data exchange service to achieve secure PDE. Second, we present a novel grid-based geometric deformation method for the security mechanism with three processes: the original shapes of a source Computer Aided Design (CAD) model can be hidden by deforming the control grid; then the deformed grid can be exchanged to target system where a deformed target CAD model can be reconstructed; at last, the deformed target CAD model can be recovered to the original shape after recovering the deformed grid. Finally, typical CAD model tests demonstrate that our method can keep the sensitive information of source model and also maintain the same level of data exchange error.