Mitigating Counterfeiting in Supply Chains using Blockchain Technology
Primary Investigator:
Aniket Kate
Aniket Kate, Mahimna Kelkar, Easwar Vivek Mangipudi, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Krutarth Rao
Abstract
Enhancing
supply chain traceability and deterring goods (like airbags of cars) counterfeiting has become a key challenge
for the commercial supply chains. Though hardware based solutions like Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) and RFID tags allows supply chain players to identify and authenticate the goods across supply
chains they 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 work 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. The blockchain
technology forms a distributed, single source of shared truth for supply chains, which along with
smart contracts helps mutually distrusting sets of players/companies with possibly
adversarial interests to collaborate with secure set of rules.