Securing Blockchain Based Food Supply Chain Traceability: An IT Audit and Risk Management Perspective on Dynamic Trust-Weighted Oracle Consensus (DTW-OC) Framework

Abstract

Food supply chains continue to be susceptible to fraud, contamination incidents, and unclear provenance records, which erode consumer confidence and significantly harm the world economy each year. Because blockchain technology provides immutable, shareable, cryptographically verified ledgers among people who distrust each other, it is frequently suggested as a solution. The oracle problem, however, is inherited by the majority of deployed systems: a ledger ensures that recorded data is not altered, but it does not ensure that the data was accurate when it was entered. In addition to reviewing the opportunities it presents for food safety and sustainability reporting, this study examines the technological, financial, and regulatory obstacles of blockchain-based food traceability and proposes a new architecture called the Dynamic Trust-Weighted Oracle Consensus (DTW-OC) framework. We present the architecture, the scoring algorithm, a comparison against Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, and PBFT, an example dairy cold-chain scenario, and a research agenda for standardisation and interoperability. DTW-OC introduces a reputation-weighted, cross-validated oracle layer that scores every IoT sensor and human data source in real time and feeds that score into block-validator selection, so a source's influence on the ledger is proportionate to its demonstrated reliability.