Single-Fragment Forensic Coding via Multidimensional Cyclically Permutable Codes

Abstract

The proliferation of 3D printing raises new security and forensic challenges, including the risk of unauthorized fabrication of untraceable firearms and other regulated items. To enable traceability, we consider \emph{single-fragment forensic coding}, in which a unique identifier is embedded into a printed object and must be recoverable from any fragment containing an axis-parallel box of prescribed minimum volume and coordinatewise thickness, even in the presence of substitution errors. To address this problem, we introduce and study multidimensional cyclically permutable codes (CPCs), for which every cyclic translate uniquely determines both the original codeword and the applied translation. By applying periodic lifting to a CPC base array, every complete period contained in a fragment corresponds to an unknown cyclic translate of a codeword, thereby reducing the forensic alignment problem to multidimensional cyclic synchronization. We establish theoretical bounds and develop explicit constructions in both the noiseless and substitution-error settings. For fixed dimension $d$ and alphabet size $q$, we obtain the optimal redundancy $d\log_q k+o(1)$ for noiseless $d$-dimensional CPCs of side length $k$. For fixed $t$, the optimal redundancy of $t$-substitution-correcting $d$-dimensional CPCs lies between $(t+1)d\log_q k+O(1)$ and $(2t+1)d\log_q k+O(1)$. For binary alphabets and $d\geq2$, an explicit robust row-anchor construction achieves $(t+1)d\log_2 k+O(\log\log k)$ redundancy, matching the optimal leading term. In the thick-fragment regime $h=cM^{1/d}$, where $M$ and $h$ lower-bound the volume and the side lengths of a box contained in the fragment, periodic lifting yields single-fragment forensic codes of rate $c^d-o(1)$. In particular, the rate approaches one when $c=1-o(1)$.