Trust Issues for Big Data About High-Value Manufactured Parts

In the world of high-value manufacturing, an imperative for productivity and quality are driving the manufacturing community towards integration of all information captured about a product along the manufacturing value chain, from its design and manufacture through usage, maintenance, and decommissioning. Much of this information is already captured, but it is scattered across many organizations, with significant variation among levels of security consciousness and information technology sophistication. Any weak link in this chain of organizations constitutes a threat that can have a major negative impact for organizations all along the chain. In this paper, we explain the reasons for the move towards integration of information about high-value manufactured products. We introduce the concept of a digital thread, which is the entre set of information about the life history of a manufactured object. We outline several key threats to digital threads that have not been fully addressed in previous work on securing provenance information, and propose digital-threads-as-a-service (DTaaS) as a potential way to mitigate several of the open issues.