DIY Spycraft with 3-D Printing

Ever wanted to send secret information just by passing along an ordinary-looking object? That’s the premise of Microsoft Research’s new project InfraStructs, which pioneers techniques for concealing identifiers inside 3D-printed objects.

Anyone with a 3D printer can fabricate an object with coded air pockets, or voids. And then anyone with a terahertz scanner can decode the tag hidden in the objects—whether it’s a shape, a line of binary, or a grey code. It’s the modern microdot.