Avoiding Counterfeits and Achieving Privacy in Supply Chain: A Blockchain Based Approach

Abstract

Counterfeiting is one of the biggest threats to the current RFID-based supply chain industry. There are several blockchain solutions suggested which preserve RFID tag uniqueness and bring all the parties to a common platform. However, they are based on some common assumptions such as an adversary may need a large number of tags to retrieve the product details. Besides, these tags can be easily cloned post supply chain and reused for counterfeiting. Lack of proper mechanisms to preserve trade secrets such as volumes and supplier relationships is also a major challenge faced by most of these systems in this competitive market. We propose a novel product ownership tracking system based on blockchain for the supply chain industry which solves these problems while allowing access to the trade secrets only to its supply chain participants. The proposed protocol is based on Shamir's threshold Scheme where a secret key is used to decrypt the trade secrets and its shares are distributed among the supply chain parties during the ownership transfer process. Product verification is done by the consumer as well with the help of the retailer at the time of sale.