Supply chain integration remains an elusive goal for the construction and engineering industry. The high degree of fragmentation and the reliance on third-party financial institutions has pushed the physical and financial supply chains apart. The paper demonstrates how blockchain-based crypto assets (crypto currencies and crypto tokens) can address this limitation when used for conditioning the flow of funds based on the flow of products. The paper contrasts the integration between cash and product flows in supply chains that rely on fiat currencies and crypto assets for their payment settlement. Two facets of crypto asset-enabled integration, atomicity and granularity, are further introduced. The thesis is validated in the context of construction progress payments. The as-built data captured by unmanned aerial and ground vehicles was passed to an autonomous smart contract-based method that utilizes crypto-currencies and crypto tokens for payment settlement; the resulting payment datasets, written to the Ethereum blockchain, were analyzed in terms of their integration of product and cash flow. The work is concluded with a discussion of findings and their implications for the industry.
This work assesses the impact of blockchain and smart contract on the visibility of construction supply chain and in the context of payments (intersection of cash and product flows). It uses comparative empirical experiments (Charrette Test Method) to draw comparisons between the visibility of state-of-practice and blockchain-enabled payment systems in a commercial construction project. Comparisons were drawn across four levels of granularity. The findings are twofold: 1) blockchain improved information completeness and information accuracy respectively by an average 216% and 261% compared wit…
Supply chain applications operate in a multi-stakeholder setting, demanding trust, provenance, and transparency. Blockchain technology provides mechanisms to establish a decentralized infrastructure involving multiple stakeholders. Such mechanisms make the blockchain technology ideal for multi-stakeholder supply chain applications. This chapter introduces the characteristics and requirements of the supply chain and explains how blockchain technology can meet the demands of supply chain applications. In particular, this chapter discusses how data and trust management can be established using bl…
Blockchain offers traceability and transparency to supply chain event data and hence can help overcome many challenges in supply chain management such as: data integrity, provenance and traceability. However, data privacy concerns such as the protection of trade secrets have hindered adoption of blockchain technology. Although consortium blockchains only allow authorised supply chain entities to read/write to the ledger, privacy preservation of trade secrets cannot be ascertained. In this work, we propose a privacy-preservation framework, PrivChain, to protect sensitive data on blockchain usin…
Despite Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have reduced the information asymmetry and increased the degree of interorganizational collaboration, the companies participating a supply chain are less inclined to share data when information is sensible and partners cannot be fully trusted. In such a context, Blockchain is a decentralized certificate authority that may provide economic and operational benefits but companies operating in a supply chain claim to have little knowledge about Blockchain due to its novelty and to the lack of use cases and application studies. In this work, …
Supply chain management (SCM) plays a vital role in the global economy, as evidenced by recent COVID-19 supply chain challenges. Traditional SCM faces security and efficiency issues, but they can be addressed by leveraging digital twins (DTs) and blockchain technology. T he combination of blockchain and DTs can refine the concepts of both technologies and reform SCM to advance into Industry 4.0. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive literature review of the blockchain-based digital twin (DT) solutions to optimise the processes of data management, data storage, and data sharing in SCM. We a…
Vaccinating the global population against Covid-19 is one of the biggest supply chain management challenges humanity has ever faced. Rapid supply of Covid-19 vaccines is essential for successful global immunization, but its effectiveness depends on a transparent supply chain that can be monitored. In this research, we have proposed an approach based on blockchain technology, which is used to ensure seamless distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine with transparency, data integrity, and full traceability of the supply chain to reduce risk, ensure safety, and immutability. A vaccine supply chain nee…
Blockchain has the potential to enhance supply chain management systems by providing stronger assurance in transparency and traceability of traded commodities. However, blockchain does not overcome the inherent issues of data trust in IoT enabled supply chains. Recent proposals attempt to tackle these issues by incorporating generic trust and reputation management, which does not entirely address the complex challenges of supply chain operations and suffers from significant drawbacks. In this paper, we propose DeTRM, a decentralised trust and reputation management solution for supply chains, w…
We investigate the relationship between underlying blockchain mechanism of cryptocurrencies and its distributional characteristics. In addition to price, we emphasise on using actual block size and block time as the operational features of cryptos. We use distributional characteristics such as fourier power spectrum, moments, quantiles, global we optimums, as well as the measures for long term dependencies, risk and noise to summarise the information from crypto time series. With the hypothesis that the blockchain structure explains the distributional characteristics of cryptos, we use charact…
Traceability and integrity are major challenges for the increasingly complex supply chains of today's world. Although blockchain technology has the potential to address these challenges through providing a tamper-proof audit trail of supply chain events and data associated with a product life-cycle, it does not solve the trust problem associated with the data itself. Reputation systems are an effective approach to solve this trust problem. However, current reputation systems are not suited to the blockchain based supply chain applications as they are based on limited observations, they lack gr…
With the advent of globalization and the evergrowing rate of technology, the volume of production as well as ease of procuring counterfeit goods has become unprecedented. Be it food, drug or luxury items, all kinds of industrial manufacturers and distributors are now seeking greater transparency in supply chain operations with a view to deter counterfeiting. This paper introduces a decentralized Blockchain based application system (DApp) with a view to identifying counterfeit products in the supply chain system. With the rapid rise of Blockchain technology, it has become known that data record…
We show how third-party web trackers can deanonymize users of cryptocurrencies. We present two distinct but complementary attacks. On most shopping websites, third party trackers receive information about user purchases for purposes of advertising and analytics. We show that, if the user pays using a cryptocurrency, trackers typically possess enough information about the purchase to uniquely identify the transaction on the blockchain, link it to the user's cookie, and further to the user's real identity. Our second attack shows that if the tracker is able to link two purchases of the same user…
The cybersecurity of modern systems has dramatically increased attention from both industrial and academia perspectives. In the recent era, the popularity of the blockchain-based system has traditionally been emergent among various industrials sectors especially in supply chain management due to its streamlined nature. This reveals the importance of the quality aspects from a supply chain management perspective. Many industries realized the importance of having quality systems for supply chain management and logistics. The emergence of blockchain technology has created several potential innova…
The traditional oil supply chain suffers from various shortcomings regarding crude oil extraction, processing, distribution, environmental pollution, and traceability. It offers an only a forward flow of products with almost no security and tracking process. In time, the system will lag behind due to the limitations in quality inspection, fraudulent information, and monopolistic behavior of supply chain entities. Inclusion of counterfeiting products and opaqueness of the system urge renovation in this sector. The recent evolution of Industry 4.0 leads to the alternation in the supply chain int…
With the increase of web users and applications with real time requests, the ability to identify, track and trace elements of a product as it moves in the supply chain is deemed necessary, and for many industries is even mandated by national or international regulations. Traceability presupposes the integrity and transparency of data that is saved and shared. This is a problem for current technologies, as there are many examples with tampered data and database vulnerabilities that resulted in serious implications and data loss. A solution to this problem can be the decentralization of the syst…
Blockchains and cryptocurrencies disrupted the conversion of energy into a medium of exchange. Numerous applications for blockchains and cryptocurrencies are now envisioned for purposes ranging from inventory control to banking applications. Naturally, in order to mine in an economically viable way, regions where energy is plentiful and cheap, e.g., close to hydroelectric plants, are sought. The possibility of converting energy into cash, however, also opens up opportunities for a new kind of cyber attack aimed at illegally mining cryptocurrencies by stealing energy. In this work, we indicate,…
Supply chains lend themselves to blockchain technology, but certain challenges remain, especially around invoice financing. For example, the further a supplier is removed from the final consumer product, the more difficult it is to get their invoices financed. Moreover, for competitive reasons, retailers and manufacturers do not want to disclose their supply chains. However, upstream suppliers need to prove that they are part of a `stable' supply chain to get their invoices financed, which presents the upstream suppliers with huge, and often unsurmountable, obstacles to get the necessary finan…
A variety of innovative software solutions, addressing product anti-counterfeiting and record provenance of the wider supply chain industry, have been implemented. However, these solutions have been developed with centralized system architecture which could be susceptible to malicious modifications on states of product records and various potential security attacks leading to system failure and downtime. Blockchain technology has been enabling decentralized trust with a network of distributed peer nodes to maintain consistent shared states via a decentralized consensus reached, with which an i…
Securing the traceability of products in the supply chain is an urgent issue. Recently, supply chain systems that use public blockchain (PBC) have been proposed. In these systems, PBC is used as a common database shared between supply chain parties to secure the integrity and reliability of distribution information such as ownership transfer records. Thus, these systems secure a high level of traceability in the supply chain. However, the distribution information, which can be private information, is made public since the information recorded in PBC can be read by anyone. In this paper, we pro…
Blockchain transactions are signed by private keys. Secure key storage and tamper-proof computers are essential requirements for deploying a trusted infrastructure. In this paper, we identify some threats against blockchain wallets and propose a set of physical and logical countermeasures to thwart them. We present the crypto terminal device, operating with a removable secure element, built on open software and hardware architectures, capable of detecting a cloned device or corrupted software. These technologies are based on tamper-resistant computing (javacard), smart card anti-cloning, smart…
A Merkle tree is an information construction that is used in Blockchain to verify data or transactions in a large content pool in a safe manner. The role of the Merkle tree is crucial in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in a Blockchain network. In this paper, we propose a bright and enhanced verification method, Merkle Trim Tree-based Blockchain Authentication (MTTBA) for the hash node traversal to reach the Merkle Root in a minimum time. MTTBA is a unique mechanism for verifying the Merkle Tree's accumulated transactions specifically for an odd number of transactions. The future impact of c…
Traceability and auditability are key structures that are vital in supply chain management and construction. However, trust is the most important aspect of customers in these systems. Also, we have to rely on third parties to trade in centralized systems. Although current exist frameworks for these solutions in the supply chain, these have work poor traceability and lack of real-time information, and especially lack of privacy-preserving. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving framework for supply chain traceability that using smart contracts. Development processes, model implementatio…
The blockchain is a distributed technology which allows establishing trust among unreliable users who interact and perform transactions with each other. While blockchain technology has been mainly used for crypto-currency, it has emerged as an enabling technology for establishing trust in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). Nevertheless, a naive usage of the blockchain for IoT leads to high delays and extensive computational power. In this paper, we propose a blockchain architecture dedicated to being used in a supply chain which comprises different distributed IoT entities. We propose …
In this paper, we present a protocol for facilitating trust-less cross-chain cryptocurrency transfers that preserve privacy of bridge withdrawals. We leverage zero-knowledge primitives that are commonly used to design cryptocurrency mixing protocols to provide similar functionality but across two or more blockchains. To that end, we receive cryptocurrency mixing for free through the bridge operations and de-scribe how to extend these protocols to incentivise bridge transfers using past ideas. We describe how resulting protocols lead to similar vampire style attacks coined in the Uniswap vs. Su…
Emerging technologies, such as Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT), have had an immense role in propelling the agricultural industry towards the fourth agricultural revolution. Blockchain and IoT can greatly improve the traceability, efficiency, and safety of food along the supply chain. Given these contributions, there are many barriers to widespread adoption of this technology, including a deficit in many workers' ability to understand and effectively use this technology in addition to a lack of infrastructure to educate and support these workers. This paper discusses the barriers to…
After being legalized as an agricultural commodity by the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, the Industrial Hemp production is moved from limited pilot programs to a regulated agriculture production system, and the market keeps increasing since then. However, Industrial Hemp Supply Chain (IHSC) faces several critical challenges, including high complexity and variability, data tampering, and lack of immutable information tracking system. In this paper, we develop a blockchain enabled internet-of-things (IoT) platform for IHSC to support process tracking, scalability, interoperability, and risk management. Ba…
Battleships is a well known traditional board game for two players which dates from World War I. Though, the game has several digital version implementations, they are affected by similar major drawbacks such as fairness and a trust model that relies on third party. In this paper, we demonstrate how to implement a fair, resistant to denial-of-service, where the honest winner earns the deposit money {\em immediately}. The game is built on a permissionless Blockchain that supports Turing complete smart-contract computation.
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 p…
The concept of blockchain has emerged as an effective solution for data-sensitive domains, such as healthcare, financial services, etc., due to its various attributes like immutability, non-repudiation, and availability. Thus, implementation of this technology in various domains rose exponentially; one of such fields is the healthcare supply chain. Managing healthcare supply chain processes effectively is very crucial for the healthcare system. Despite various innovations in the method of treatment methodologies, the healthcare supply chain management system is not up to the mark and lacks eff…
Supply chain finance(SCF) is committed to providing credit for small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) with low credit lines and small financing scales. The resulting financial credit data and related business transaction data are highly confidential and private. However, traditional SCF management schemes mostly use third-party platforms and centralized designs, which cannot achieve highly reliable secure storage and fine-grained access control. To fill this gap, this paper designs and implements Fabric-SCF, a secure storage and access control system based on blockchain and attribute-based a…
Innovative solutions addressing product anti-counterfeiting and record provenance have been deployed across today's internationally spanning supply chain networks. These product anti-counterfeiting solutions are developed and implemented with centralized system architecture relying on centralized authorities or any form of intermediaries. Vulnerabilities of centralized product anti-counterfeiting solutions could possibly lead to system failure or susceptibility of malicious modifications performed on product records or various potential attacks to the system components by dishonest participant…
We increasingly live in a world where there is a balance between the rights to privacy and the requirements for consent, and the rights of society to protect itself. Within this world, there is an ever-increasing requirement to protect the identities involved within financial transactions, but this makes things increasingly difficult for law enforcement agencies, especially in terms of financial fraud and money laundering. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in terms of the methods of privacy that are being used within cryptocurrency transactions, and in the challenges that law enforcement…
Permissioned blockchain such as Hyperledger fabric enables a secure supply chain model in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) through multichannel and private data collection mechanisms. Sharing of Industrial data including private data exchange at every stage between supply chain partners helps to improve product quality, enable future forecast, and enhance management activities. However, the existing data sharing and querying mechanism in Hyperledger fabric is not suitable for supply chain environment in IIoT because the queries are evaluated on actual data stored on ledger which consists o…
We propose the formal study of governed blockchains that are owned and controlled by organizations and that neither create cryptocurrencies nor provide any incentives to solvers of cryptographic puzzles. We view such approaches as frameworks in which system parts, such as the cryptographic puzzle, may be instantiated with different technology. Owners of such a blockchain procure puzzle solvers as resources they control, and use a mathematical model to compute optimal parameters for the cryptographic puzzle mechanism or other parts of the blockchain. We illustrate this approach with a use case …
Inspired by Bitcoin, many different kinds of cryptocurrencies based on blockchain technology have turned up on the market. Due to the special structure of the blockchain, it has been deemed impossible to directly trade between traditional currencies and cryptocurrencies or between different types of cryptocurrencies. Generally, trading between different currencies is conducted through a centralized third-party platform. However, it has the problem of a single point of failure, which is vulnerable to attacks and thus affects the security of the transactions. In this paper, we propose a distribu…
The complexity of today's supply chain, organised in several tiers and including many companies located in different countries, makes it challenging to assess the history and integrity of procured physical parts, and to make organisations really accountable for their conduct. This enables malicious practices like counterfeiting and insertion of back doors, which are extremely dangerous, especially in supply chains of physical parts for industrial control systems used in critical infrastructures, where a country and human lives can be put at risk. This paper aims at mitigating these issues by p…
With the passage of the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, Industrial Hemp production is moved from limited pilot programs to a regulated agriculture production system. However, Industrial Hemp Supply Chain (IHSC) faces critical challenges, including: high complexity and variability, very limited production knowledge, lack of data and information tracking. In this paper, we propose blockchain-enabled IHSC and develop a preliminary simulation-based digital twin for this distributed cyber-physical system (CPS) to support the process learning and risk management. Basically, we develop a two-layer blockchain wi…
Integrating on-chain and off-chain data storage for decentralised and distributed information systems, such as blockchain, presents specific challenges for providing transparency of data governance and ensuring data integrity through stakeholder engagement. Current research on blockchain-based supply chains focuses on using on-chain governance rules developed for cryptocurrency blockchains to store some critical data points without designing tailored on-chain governance mechanisms and disclosing off-chain decision-making processes on data governance. In response to this research gap, this pape…
This applied research paper introduces a novel framework for integrating hardware security and blockchain functionality with grid-edge devices to establish a distributed cyber-security mechanism that verifies the provenance of messages to and from the devices. Expanding the idea of Two Factor Authentication and Hardware Root of Trust, this work describes the development of a Cryptographic Trust Center(TM) (CTC(TM)) chip integrated into grid-edge devices to create uniform cryptographic key management. Product managers, energy system designers, and security architects can utilize this modular fr…
Blockchain technology has been transforming the financial industry and has created a new crypto-economy in the last decade. The foundational concepts such as decentralized trust and distributed ledger are promising for distributed, and large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the applications of Blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies in this domain are few and far between because of the lack of understanding and inherent architectural challenges. In this paper, we describe the opportunities for applications of blockchain for the IoT and examine the challenges involved in archite…
The growing sophistication of cyber attacks, vulnerabilities in high computing systems and increasing dependency on cryptography to protect our digital data make it more important to keep secret keys safe and secure. Few major issues on secret keys like incorrect use of keys, inappropriate storage of keys, inadequate protection of keys, insecure movement of keys, lack of audit logging, insider threats and non-destruction of keys can compromise the whole security system dangerously. In this article, we have proposed and implemented an isolated secret key memory which can log life cycle of secre…
Motivated by the great success and adoption of Bitcoin, a number of cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum are becoming increasingly popular. Although existing blockchain-based cryptocurrency schemes can ensure reasonable security for transactions, they do not consider any notion of fairness. Fair exchange allows two players to exchange digital "items", such as digital signatures, over insecure networks fairly, so that either each player gets the other's item, or neither player does. Given that blockchain participants typically do not trust each other, enabling fairness in e…
