Enhanced MQTT Architecture for Smart Supply Chain

Abstract

In industry 4.0, the use of smart supply chains has become necessary in order to overcome the shortcomings of traditional supply chains, such as overstocking, delivery delays, and stock out. However, the use of smart supply chains has introduced new security challenges because of the internet of things (IOT) constraint nature. Thus, the problem raised is ensuring the supply chain security requirements while taking into consideration the properties of the constraint environment. For this purpose, this paper aims to strengthen the authentication and data transmitting processes of the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport(MQTT) protocol, as the most used protocol for communication in the IOT environment, using blockchain and smart contracts. The new MQTT architecture allows to avoid a single point of failure, to ensure data immutability and to automatize the authentication mechanism as well as the publishing and the subscribing processes. In addition, the use of a one-time password (OTP) instead of a permanent one is another security measure used to protect the architecture from identity spoofing. The new architecture comprises three phases: Registration, Connection, and Publishing. Each phase is automatically controlled by a smart contract. For attack simulation tests, the smart contracts are implemented in a remix environment. The results of the simulation tests show that the new architecture is robust and resistant to different attacks.