Blockchain and off-chain: A Solution for Audit Issues in Supply Chain Systems

Abstract

Even though there are researchers focused on implementing blockchain in auditing aspects, some data is cumbersome, and storing it on a blockchain requires too much computational cost. That's where a hybrid solution would be better. We aim to provide a blockchain-off-chain mechanism in the supply chain area. This paper presents an audit mechanism that, in the first instance, saves all the events (records) of a supply chain within a blockchain in a hashed form. In a second instance, users of a supply chain system can query integrity, data provenance, and traceability to blockchain through an intermediate server that establishes communication between blockchain and the supply chain. Our proposal has been validated employing a proof of concept where, some avocado supply chain services have been implemented using a microservices architecture.