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Developments in digital technology and manufacturing processes have expanded the horizon of designer innovation in creating products. In addition to this, real-time collaborative platforms help designers shorten the product development cycle by enabling collaborations with domain experts from concept generation to product realization and after-market. These collaborations are extending beyond enterprise and national boundaries, contributing to a growing concern among designers regarding the security of their sensitive information such as intellectual property (IP) and trade secrets. The source of such sensitive information leaks could be external (e.g., hacker) or internal (e.g., disgruntled employee) to the collaboration. From a designer's perspective, this fear can inhibit participation in a collaboration even though it might result in better products or services. In this paper, we aim to contextualize this evolving security space by discussing various security practices in digital domains, such as encryption and secret sharing, as well as manufacturing domains, such as physically unclonable function (PUF) and physical part watermarking for anticounterfeiting and tamper evidence purposes. Further, we classify these practices with respect to their performance against different adversarial models for different stages in product development. Such a classification can help designers to make informed decisions regarding security practices during the product realization process.

The globalization of collaboration in engineering design has raised several new concerns regarding information sharing. In particular, data shared during collaboration has the potential to leak private information through inferences that may be made by another collaborator. Enterprises that must keep certain information confidential, fearing loss of intellectual property, may turn down potential collaborations that would otherwise be mutually beneficial. Thus, there is need for a method to study this tradeoff between confidentiality and value in engineering collaboration. In this paper, a framework for analyzing this tradeoff is proposed, along with an illustrative example of a possible implementation and its effects on the collaborative design process. This framework estimates and quantifies the confidentiality loss and value gain associated with information revelation during design iterations. We believe that such analysis would aid designers in making better decisions about sharing information with their collaborators. Studying this tradeoff may incentivize designers to engage in more frequent, and more secure, collaboration.

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