DUST-BT: Detection of Unauthorized Supply Chain Tampering using Blockchain Technology
Primary Investigator:
Aniket Kate
Aniket Kate, Mahimna Kelkar, Easwar Vivek Mangipudi, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Krutarth Rao
Abstract
Counterfeiting is one of the biggest issues faced by today’s global supply chains. Enhancing supply chain traceability and deterring electronics counterfeiting has become a key challenge for the commercial as well as military electronics supply chains. Over the last decade, the supply chain systems have started to employ hardware-based security solutions such as RFID tags and physically unclonable functions (or PUFs) to address this problem. RFID tags and PUFs allows supply chain players to identify and authenticate the goods across supply chains efficiently and significantly reliably even in malicious environments. However, these hardware-based solutions cannot prevent the counterfeiting and duplication attacks launched by the supply chain players themselves: the adversarial supply chain players can easily equivocate (and modify the supply chain logs) to present conflicting views to other players and to end consumers.
This proposal aims at solving this equivocation problem with the current supply chains. In particular, our DUST-BT project plans to revolutionize the current supply chain management systems by executing the supply and tracking of goods along with the payments using the blockchain technology. In DUST-BT, the disruptive blockchain technology forms a distributed, single source of shared truth for supply chains, which using smart contracts combine mutually distrusting sets of players/companies with possibly adversarial interests and allow them to collaborate with secure set of rules.