Untangling the Use of Blockchain in Distributed AgriFood Supply Chains: IoT data privacy and ABAC policy smart contract

Abstract

Blockchain is portrayed as a technology capable of solving problems of transparency, traceability, data tampering and accountability in the Agrifood supply chain. However, the transparency provided brings privacy issues and furthermore, this sector is characterized by the use of IoT devices for process automation, and these devices have problems of limited performance, mobility, etc, making it difficult to manage the large scale IoT environment using current security, authentication and access control solutions. To address these challenges, the work proposes an architecture for storing private data, allowing only authorized participants to have access. These data are stored by IoT devices in the participant’s cloud after its transaction has been validated by the endorsing peers and in accordance with the attribute-based access control (ABAC) policy that allows the IoT device owners configure the physical quantities, the range of values, time period, body type, that each device is allowed to measure and transmit. An user can be authorized to read IoT data under the ABAC policy contract. 50% of IoT 1 Springer Nature 2021 L A T E X template Article Title data write requests are performed and answered in less than 0.14 seconds and 2.5 seconds using solo and raft ordering service, respectively. On the other hand, data retrieval had a average latency ranging from 0.34 to 0.57 seconds and throughput from 124.8 to 9.9 Transactions Per Second (TPS) for data sizes ranging from 8 to 512 kilobytes.