SPOQchain: Platform for Secure, Scalable, and Privacy-Preserving Supply Chain Tracing and Counterfeit Protection

TL;DR

SPOQchain is a blockchain platform that enhances supply chain traceability and counterfeit detection by integrating secure identifiers like PUFs, while ensuring privacy and scalability through innovative batching and security mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces SPOQchain, a novel blockchain-based system combining secure identifiers and efficient batching to improve supply chain transparency, privacy, and scalability.

Findings

SPOQchain achieves high scalability in supply chain tracing.

The platform effectively preserves user privacy.

Security analysis confirms robustness against potential threats.

Abstract

Product lifecycle tracing is increasingly in the focus of regulators and producers, as shown with the initiative of the Digital Product Pass. Likewise, new methods of counterfeit detection are developed that are, e.g., based on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). In order to ensure trust and integrity of product lifecycle data, multiple existing supply chain tracing systems are built on blockchain technology. However, only few solutions employ secure identifiers such as PUFs. Furthermore, existing systems that publish the data of individual products, in part fully transparently, have a detrimental impact on scalability and the privacy of users. This work proposes SPOQchain, a novel blockchain-based platform that provides comprehensive lifecycle traceability and originality verification while ensuring high efficiency and user privacy. The improved efficiency is achieved by a sophisticated batching mechanism that removes lifecycle redundancies. In addition to the successful evaluation of SPOQchain's scalability, this work provides a comprehensive analysis of privacy and security aspects, demonstrating the need and qualification of SPOQchain for the future of supply chain tracing.