Decentralizing Supply Chain Anti-Counterfeiting Systems Using Blockchain Technology.

Abstract

An interesting research problem in supply chain industry is evaluating and determining provenance of physical goods - demonstrating authenticity of luxury goods. Yet, there have been a few innovative software solutions addressing product anti-counterfeiting and record provenance of today's goods that are produced and transported in complex and internationally-spanning supply chain networks. However, these supply chain systems have been implemented with centralized system architecture, relying on centralized authorities or any form of intermediaries, and leading to issues such as single-point processing, storage and failure, which could be susceptible to malicious modifications of product records or various potential attacks to system components by dishonest participant nodes traversing along the supply chain. Blockchain technology has evolved from being merely a decentralized, distributed and immutable ledger of cryptocurrency transactions to a programmable interactive environment for building decentralized and reliable applications addressing different use cases and existing problems in the world. In this research, the Decentralized NFC-Enabled Anti-Counterfeiting System (dNAS) is proposed and developed, decentralizing a legacy anti-counterfeiting system of supply chain industry using Blockchain technology, to facilitate trustworthy data provenance retrieval, verification and management, as well as strengthening capability of product anti-counterfeiting in supply chain industry. The proposed dNAS utilizes decentralized blockchain network on a consensus protocol compatible with the concept of enterprise consortium, programmable smart contracts and a distributed file storage system to develop a secure and immutable scientific data provenance tracking and management platform on which provenance records, providing compelling properties on data integrity, are validated automatically.