Title: Supply chain provenance with offline verification through a low-requirement, blockchain-based framework

Authors: Tabish; Raisa Arief; Auqib Hamid Lone; Roohie Naaz Mir

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Srinagar, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Srinagar, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Srinagar, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Srinagar, India

Abstract: Blockchain proves to be an ideal candidate for establishing provenance in supply chains. For ensuring widespread adoption, such frameworks must have low cost-overheads while guaranteeing protection from counterfeiting and must provide end-to-end transparency. A vast majority of existing platforms that attempt to address the lack of provenance knowledge do so by relying on centralised architectures or through the use of high requirement hardware components. In this paper, we propose a robust and adaptable provenance framework running on the decentralised blockchain architecture, along with P2P based offline verification, to address the most common supply chain attacks. Minimal assumptions have been made about the hardware required for enforcing such a platform in general supply chains. The proposed system also allows fully off-chain verification of product attributes and semi-online verification of product ownership using cryptographic methods. This allows a decentralised and cryptographically secure flow of provenance knowledge in supply chains.

Keywords: provenance; supply chain; blockchain; anti-counterfeiting; P2P architecture.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBC.2022.122988

International Journal of Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies, 2022 Vol.3 No.1, pp.41 - 59

Received: 29 Jul 2021
Accepted: 05 Dec 2021
Published online: 19 May 2022 *