A Blockchain-based Data Sharing Scheme in The Supply Chain by IIoT

Abstract

A supply chain is a system that includes multiple entities such as suppliers, manufacturers, carriers, retailers, and customers. How to encourage the willingness to cooperate and share information between these entities has always been one of the major challenges in the field of supply chain management. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) can help entities get real-time data in the supply chain to share the key information and reduce costs. However, the supply chain not only needs to know how to gather the data but also ensures that the data processed is not leaked. Since Blockchain, as the main technology of Bitcoin, has the advantages of traceability and anti-counterfeiting, blockchain is the right tool to tackle the date sharing problem in supply chain. In this paper, we connect IIoT devices to the blockchain by combining the monitoring and recording of IIoT devices and storing real-time data in the network by smart contract. In addition, a blockchain-based supply chain structure is proposed. This structure provides collaboration solutions between different entities in the supply chain. In this structure, a fine-grained data sharing scheme for supply chain is proposed. By setting access policies to the smart contract, only the companies that satisfy the attributes of access policies can execute the smart contract and view the details of the transaction. The proposed scheme ensures reliability of data in the supply chain, and the privacy protection of the chain.