Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) needed a way to secure smart manufacturing systems using the digital thread, so they turned to the new kid on the block... blockchain, that is.

According to a new NIST report, the security system better known for underpinning Bitcoin and other digital currencies not only provides tamper-proof transmission of manufacturing data, it also yields something just as valuable to its users: traceability of those data to all participants in the production process.

“Because blockchain gives us both capabilities, we can build trustworthiness into digital manufacturing networks,” says NIST mechanical engineer Thomas Hedberg, one of the authors of the report.

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