# Orchestrating Product Provenance Story: When IOTA ECOSYSTEM Meets The Electronics Supply Chain Space

## TL;DR

This paper presents a framework using IOTA's permissioned ledger and Masked Authenticated Messaging to enhance trustworthy, tamper-proof provenance tracking in the electronics supply chain, addressing blockchain scalability and confidentiality challenges.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel IOTA-based provenance framework with MAM for secure, confidential, and transparent supply chain data management in electronics manufacturing.

## Key findings

- Efficient construction time for provenance data varies with payload size.
- The framework ensures tamper-proof and confidential supply chain information.
- Enhanced traceability of product journey at each supply chain step.

## Abstract

"Trustworthy data" is the fuel for ensuring transparent traceability, precise decision-making, and cogent coordination in the supply chain (SC) space. However, the disparate data silos act as a trade barrier in orchestrating the provenance of product story starting from the transformation of raw materials into the circuit board to the assembling of electronic components into end products available on the store shelf for customers. Therefore, to bridge the fragmented siloed information across global supply chain partners, the diffusion of blockchain (BC) as one of the advanced distributed ledger technology (DLT) takeover the on-premise legacy systems. Nevertheless, the challenging constraints of blockchain including scalability, accessing off-line data, fee-less microtransactions and many more lead to the third wave of blockchain called IOTA. In this paper, we propose a framework for supporting provenance in the electronic supply chain (ECS) by using permissioned IOTA ledger. Realizing the crucial requirement of trustworthy data, we use Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) channel provided by IOTA that allows the SC players to procure distributed information while keeping confidential trade flows, tamper-proof data, and fine-grained accessibility rights. To identify operational disruption, we devise a transparent product ledger through transaction data and consignment information to keep track of the complete product journey at each intermediary step during SC processes. Furthermore, we evaluate the secure provenance data construction time for varying payload size.