Towards a Supply Chain Management System for Counterfeit Mitigation using Blockchain and PUF

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain-based supply chain management system utilizing physically unclonable functions (PUFs) for unique identification of parts, aiming to detect tampering and mitigate counterfeiting in critical infrastructure supply chains.

Contribution

It introduces a novel anti-counterfeiting approach combining consortium blockchain, smart contracts, and PUFs for secure, decentralized part tracking across multiple sites.

Findings

Security analysis confirms robustness against tampering.

Prototype demonstrates technical feasibility.

System effectively detects counterfeit parts.

Abstract

The complexity of today's supply chain, organised in several tiers and including many companies located in different countries, makes it challenging to assess the history and integrity of procured physical parts, and to make organisations really accountable for their conduct. This enables malicious practices like counterfeiting and insertion of back doors, which are extremely dangerous, especially in supply chains of physical parts for industrial control systems used in critical infrastructures, where a country and human lives can be put at risk. This paper aims at mitigating these issues by proposing an approach where procured parts are uniquely identified and tracked along the chain, across multiple sites, to detect tampering. Our solution is based on consortium blockchain and smart contract technologies, hence it is decentralised, highly available and provides strong guarantees on the integrity of stored data and executed business logic. The unique identification of parts along the chain is implemented by using physically unclonable functions (PUFs) as tamper-resistant IDs. We first define the threat model of an adversary interested in tampering with physical products along the supply chain, then provide the design of the tracking system that implements the proposed anti-counterfeiting approach. We present a security analysis of the tracking system against the designated threat model and a prototype evaluation to show its technical feasibility and assess its effectiveness in counterfeit mitigation. Finally, we discuss several key practical aspects concerning our solution ad its integration with real supply chains.