Uninterrupted Trust: Continuous Authentication in Blockchain-Enhanced Supply Chains
Vangelis Malamas, Dimitris Koutras, Panayiotis Kotzanikolaou · 2023
In today's complex global supply chains, ensuring the integrity, authenticity, and security of products as they traverse through multiple stages is of paramount significance. The growing integration of IoT devices for product monitoring throughout the supply chain amplifies the need for enhanced transparency and data security. Currently, supply chain partici-pants operate with relative autonomy, each maintaining propri-etary systems for logging product data. Achieving interoperability among these stakeholders often presents numerous challenges, with the trustworthiness of shared data resting largely on the integrity of the data custodian overseeing the sharing and preservation of a portion of the data. Cryptographic methods have been frequently adopted to cater to the granular access requirements of shareable data. However, conventional cryp-tographic methodologies occasionally fall short in delivering real-time authentication and trust verification. To address this critical gap, blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution, offering immutable and transparent record-keeping capabilities. While blockchain's integration addresses several modern supply chain system demands, the need to combine it with continuous authentication processes for the integrated IoT devices persists. This paper presents a novel architecture for ensuring trust and security throughout the supply chain process by leveraging both block chain and Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) integrated into the IoT devices. Specifically, the proposed architecture deploys a private blockchain-where each stakeholder maintains a node of the network-and PUF-equipped IoT devices for continuous authentication and monitoring.