Toward Blockchain-Enabled Supply Chain Anti-Counterfeiting and Traceability

Abstract

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 anticounterfeiting 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 nodes traversing along the supply chain. Blockchain technology has progressed from merely with an use case of immutable ledger for cryptocurrency transactions to a programmable interactive environment of developing decentralized and reliable applications addressing different use cases globally. In this research, so as to facilitate trustworthy data provenance retrieval, verification and management, as well as strengthening capability of product anti-counterfeiting in supply chain industry, key areas of decentralization and feasible mechanisms of developing decentralized and distributed versions of these product anti-counterfeiting and traceability ecosystems utilizing blockchain technology, are identified via a series of security and threat analyses performed mainly against the NFC-Enabled Anti-Counterfeiting System (NAS) which is one of these solutions currently implemented in supply chain industry with centralized architecture. A set of fundamental system requirements are set out for developing a blockchain-enabled autonomous and decentralized ecosystem for supply chain anti-counterfeiting and traceability, as a secure and immutable scientific data provenance tracking and management platform in which provenance records, providing compelling properties on data integrity of luxurious goods, are recorded and verified automatically, for supply chain industry.

Decentralizing Supply Chain Anti-Counterfeiting Systems Using Blockchain Technology

“…As explained with research findings of security analyses performed in [2], amongst NAS and other existing anticounterfeiting alternatives with centralized architecture, utilizing wireless tag communication technologies, there are three common counterfeit attacks in the existing centralized anti-counterfeiting and traceability solutions: (1) modification of product records stored in tags, such as fabricating product identifiers or metadata of any wine product, (2) cloning of tag metadata such as those genuine wine records to any counterfeit product tag, and (3) removal of legitimate tags from genuine wine products with reapplications to other counterfeit wine products.…”

“…Given the growing concern and worsening situation in trading activities of counterfeit products, there have been anti-counterfeiting solutions developed and implemented in the supply chain systems of different industries as listed and explained in [2]. Wireless communication technologies, such as RFID (Radio-frequency Identification) or NFC (Nearfield communication which is a subset of RFID), powering the Internet of Things (IoT) are mostly those existing anticounterfeiting and traceability solutions with centralized architectures currently based on, via packaging the tags on packets of goods or products itself for identification and anti-counterfeiting purpose.…”

“…The typical architecture of centralized supply chains creates several concerns as discussed in [2]. First, there is a tremendous processing burden on servers, since significant numbers of products flooded through multiple supply chain nodes.…”

“…dNAS aims at delivering a more secured and quality approach to verify the authenticity and provenance of luxurious products such as bottled wine, with the use of a peer-topeer Blockchain Network of Blockchain 2.0 implementations as explained in [2], basing on the concept of enterprise consortium, and a peer-to-peer distributed file storage system, such as IPFS, which has the potential to eliminate absurd amount of costs for on-chain storage and provide enhanced privacy, reliability and quality of service compared with the legacy NAS with centralized architecture.…”

“…According to the potential opportunities and concerns of developing decentralized solutions for supply chain anticounterfeiting and traceability, explained in the research discussion result of [2], a fundamental set of system requirements for developing dNAS is therefore defined.…”