Enhancing enterprises trust mechanism through integrating blockchain technology into e-commerce platform for SMEs

Abstract

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) contribute to strengthening the global market by creating new jobs. Interactions among these companies may indeed be facilitated via e-commerce platforms. However, e-commerce activities seem to be a virtual face-to-face transactions, highly digital, and mutable. E-commerce based SMEs are frequently exposed to virtuous risks and competitive intensity. Blockchain is a digital database with the features of truthfulness, assurance, accountability, and intractability. It is made up of decentralized data storage, a consensus algorithm, and smart contracts. As a result, integrating e-commerce platforms and blockchain networks to help SMEs overcome their security difficulties. Conventional e-commerce platforms and storage depends on authorized intermediary networks or distributed cloud storage. Still, the failure of a single device is a danger, and third parties access, and data storage systems might be subject to data theft attacks. This paper presents a proof-of-authority (PoA) based consensus mechanism for e-commerce platforms in SMEs to address security issues in the network. This manuscript initially developed an energy-efficient PoA based consensus mechanism supported by e-commerce platforms for SMEs. We construct a comprehensive PoA consensus model based on pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) and accumulated validators number (AVN) for adding a new block in the conceptual framework. Finally, we demonstrate the security performance of the proposed consensus mechanism to help SMEs solve finance and trading issues. To evaluate the energy performance of the proposed model, we did a CPU utilization analysis and compared it with existing consensus protocols.