Trusted Traceability Service: A Novel Approach to Securing Supply Chains

Abstract

Counterfeit products cause financial losses for both the manufacturer and the enduser; e.g., fake foods and medicines pose significant risks to the public’s health. Moreover, it is challenging to ensure trust in a product’s supply chain, preventing counterfeit goods from being distributed throughout the network. However, fake product detection methods are expensive and need to be more scalable, whereas a unified traceability system for packaged products is not available. Therefore, this research proposes a product traceability system, named Trusted Traceability Service (TTS), using Blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). The TTS can be incorporated across diverse industries because of its generic and manageable four-layer product packaging strategy. Blockchain-enabled SSI empowers distributed nodes, to verify them without a centralized client–server authorization architecture. Moreover, due to its distributed nature, the proposed TTS framework is scalable and robust, with the use of web3.0 distributed application development. The adoption of Fantom, a public blockchain infrastructure, allows the proposed system to handle thousands of successful transactions more cost-effectively than the Ethereum network. The deployment of the proposed framework in both public and private blockchain networks demonstrated its superiority in execution time and number of successful transactions.