Supply Chain Tracing and Anti-Counterfeiting with Distributed Ledger Technology

In recent times, there has been a rampant proliferation of counterfeit products that has left a trail of devastation in the manufacturing sectors. The repercussions of this extend to companies, impacting their brand reputation, revenue streams and overall profitability. Industries like agriculture, banking, electronics, and high-value deliveries uses the emergence of blockchain technology as a powerful tool to discern between authentic and counterfeit items. Its potential as a means to curtail the influx of fake products in the market is substantial. Blockchain technology, at its core, operates as a decentralized and distributed digital ledger system, meticulously recording transactions within interconnected blocks across multiple databases. The inherent security of this technology ensures the immutability of these blocks, rendering them invulnerable to alteration or hacking. By leveraging blockchain technology, consumers can independently verify the authenticity of a product, eliminating the need for reliance on third-party intermediaries. Incorporating recent technological advancements, the utilization of Quick Response (QR) codes offers a robust approach to combat the proliferation of counterfeit goods. The integration of blockchain technology with QR codes serves as a means to uphold the integrity of products. This innovative system securely stores product details and unique codes in the form of blocks,  where QR codes play a pivotal role in collecting and matching these unique codes with entries in the blockchain database. If the QR code matches with entries in the database, the user receives a confirmation of the product's authenticity; otherwise, an alert is triggered, signaling the presence of a counterfeit product

Fashion Industry

Fashion is a lot more than providing an answer to primary needs. It is a way of communication, of distinction, of proclaiming a unique taste and expressing the belonging to a group. Sometimes to an exclusive group. Currently, the fashion industry is moving towards hyperspace, to a multidimensional world that is springing from the integration of smart textiles and wearable technologies. It is far beyond aesthetics. New properties of smart textiles let designers experiment with astonishing forms and expressions. There are also surprising contrasts and challenges: a new life for natural fibers, sustainable fabrics and dyeing techniques, rediscovered by eco-fashion, and "artificial apparel," made of wearable electronic components. How is this revolution affecting the strategies of the fashion industry

Decentralized Identity and Access Management Framework for Internet of Things Devices

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) domain is about connecting people and devices and systems together via sensors and actuators, to collect meaningful information from the devices surrounding environment and take actions to enhance productivity and efficiency. The proliferation of IoT devices from around few billion devices today to over 25 billion in the next few years spanning over heterogeneous networks defines a new paradigm shift for many industrial and smart connectivity applications. The existing IoT networks faces a number of operational challenges linked to devices management and the capability of devices’ mutual authentication and authorization. While significant progress has been made in adopting existing connectivity and management frameworks, most of these frameworks are designed to work for unconstrained devices connected in centralized networks. On the other hand, IoT devices are constrained devices with tendency to work and operate in decentralized and peer-to-peer arrangement. This tendency towards peer-to-peer service exchange resulted that many of the existing frameworks fails to address the main challenges faced by the need to offer ownership of devices and the generated data to the actual users. Moreover, the diversified list of devices and offered services impose that more granular access control mechanisms are required to limit the exposure of the devices to external threats and provide finer access control policies under control of the device owner without the need for a middleman. This work addresses these challenges by utilizing the concepts of decentralization introduced in Distributed Ledger (DLT) technologies and capability of automating business flows through smart contracts. The proposed work utilizes the concepts of decentralized identifiers (DIDs) for establishing a decentralized devices identity management framework and exploits Blockchain tokenization through both fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to build a self-controlled and self-contained access control policy based on capability-based access control model (CapBAC). The defined framework provides a layered approach that builds on identity management as the foundation to enable authentication and authorization processes and establish a mechanism for accounting through the adoption of standardized DLT tokenization structure. The proposed framework is demonstrated through implementing a number of use cases that addresses issues related identity management in industries that suffer losses in billions of dollars due to counterfeiting and lack of global and immutable identity records. The framework extension to support applications for building verifiable data paths in the application layer were addressed through two simple examples. The system has been analyzed in the case of issuing authorization tokens where it is expected that DLT consensus mechanisms will introduce major performance hurdles. A proof of concept emulating establishing concurrent connections to a single device presented no timed-out requests at 200 concurrent connections and a rise in the timed-out requests ratio to 5% at 600 connections. The analysis showed also that a considerable overhead in the data link budget of 10.4% is recorded due to the use of self-contained policy token which is a trade-off between building self-contained access tokens with no middleman and link cost

An end-to-end bidirectional authentication system for pallet pooling management through blockchain internet of things (BIoT)

Pallet pooling is regarded as a sustainable and cost-effective measure for the industry, but it is challenging to advocate due to weak data and pallet authentication. In order to establish trust between end-users and pallet pooling services, the authors propose an end-to-end, bidirectional authentication system for transmitted data and pallets based on blockchain and internet-of-things (IoT) technologies. In addition, secure data authentication fosters the pallet authenticity in the whole supply chain network, which is achieved by considering the tag, location, and object-specific features. To evaluate the object-specific features, the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) approach is adopted to match key-points and descriptors between two pallet images. According to the case study, it is found that the proposed system provides a low bandwidth blocking rate and a high probability of restoring complete data payloads. Consequently, positive influences on end-user satisfaction, quality of service, operational errors, and pallet traceability are achieved through the deployment of the proposed system

An Empirical Analysis to Control Product Counterfeiting in the Automotive Industry\u27s Supply Chains in Pakistan

The counterfeits pose significant health and safety threat to consumers. The quality image of firms is vulnerable to the damage caused by the expanding flow of counterfeit products in today’s global supply chains. The counterfeiting markets are swelling due to globalization and customers’ willingness to buy counterfeits, fueling illicit activities to explode further. Buyers look for the original parts are deceived by the false (deceptive) signals’ communication. The counterfeiting market has become a multi-billion industry but lacks detailed insights into the supply side of counterfeiting (deceptive side). The study aims to investigate and assess the relationship between the anti-counterfeiting strategies and improvement in the firm’s supply performance within the internal and external supply chain quality management context in the auto-parts industry’s supply chains in Pakistan

Trusted and Privacy-preserving Embedded Systems: Advances in Design, Analysis and Application of Lightweight Privacy-preserving Authentication and Physical Security Primitives

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) enables RFID readers to perform fully automatic wireless identification of objects labeled with RFID tags and is widely deployed to many applications, such as access control, electronic tickets and payment as well as electronic passports. This prevalence of RFID technology introduces various risks, in particular concerning the privacy of its users and holders. Despite the privacy risk, classical threats to authentication and identification systems must be considered to prevent the adversary from impersonating or copying (cloning) a tag. This thesis summarizes the state of the art in secure and privacy-preserving authentication for RFID tags with a particular focus on solutions based on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). It presents advancements in the design, analysis and evaluation of secure and privacy-preserving authentication protocols for RFID systems and PUFs. Formalizing the security and privacy requirements on RFID systems is essential for the design of provably secure and privacy-preserving RFID protocols. However, existing RFID security and privacy models in the literature are often incomparable and in part do not reflect the capabilities of real-world adversaries. We investigate subtle issues such as tag corruption aspects that lead to the impossibility of achieving both mutual authentication and any reasonable notion of privacy in one of the most comprehensive security and privacy models, which is the basis of many subsequent works. Our results led to the refinement of this privacy model and were considered in subsequent works on privacy-preserving RFID systems. A promising approach to enhance the privacy in RFID systems without lifting the computational requirements on the tags are anonymizers. These are special devices that take off the computational workload from the tags. While existing anonymizer-based protocols are subject to impersonation and denial-of-service attacks, existing RFID security and privacy models do not include anonymizers. We present the first security and privacy framework for anonymizer-enabled RFID systems and two privacy-preserving RFID authentication schemes using anonymizers. Both schemes achieve several appealing features that were not simultaneously achieved by any previous proposal. The first protocol is very efficient for all involved entities, achieves privacy under tag corruption. It is secure against impersonation attacks and forgeries even if the adversary can corrupt the anonymizers. The second scheme provides for the first time anonymity and untraceability of tags against readers as well as secure tag authentication against collisions of malicious readers and anonymizers using tags that cannot perform public-key cryptography (i.e., modular exponentiations). The RFID tags commonly used in practice are cost-efficient tokens without expensive hardware protection mechanisms. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) promise to provide an effective security mechanism for RFID tags to protect against basic hardware attacks. However, existing PUF-based RFID authentication schemes are not scalable, allow only for a limited number of authentications and are subject to replay, denial-of-service and emulation attacks. We present two scalable PUF-based authentication schemes that overcome these problems. The first protocol supports tag and reader authentication, is resistant to emulation attacks and highly scalable. The second protocol uses a PUF-based key storage and addresses an open question on the feasibility of destructive privacy, i.e., the privacy of tags that are destroyed during tag corruption. The security of PUFs relies on assumptions on physical properties and is still under investigation. PUF evaluation results in the literature are difficult to compare due to varying test conditions and different analysis methods. We present the first large-scale security analysis of ASIC implementations of the five most popular electronic PUF types, including Arbiter, Ring Oscillator, SRAM, Flip-Flop and Latch PUFs. We present a new PUF evaluation methodology that allows a more precise assessment of the unpredictability properties than previous approaches and we quantify the most important properties of PUFs for their use in cryptographic schemes. PUFs have been proposed for various applications, including anti-counterfeiting and authentication schemes. However, only rudimentary PUF security models exist, limiting the confidence in the security claims of PUF-based security mechanisms. We present a formal security framework for PUF-based primitives, which has been used in subsequent works to capture the properties of image-based PUFs and in the design of anti-counterfeiting mechanisms and physical hash functions

IN BLOCKCHAIN WE TRUST? The examination of an anti-counterfeiting solution

Product Counterfeiting is deemed a major and pertinent threat to the global luxury sector. The entanglement of luxury and counterfeiting has evolved into a complex problem for the modern milieu. This aim of exploring this topic as social phenomena seeks to expose the shadow economy of counterfeiting, unpack issues of intellectual property and the threat posed through the integration and adoption of blockchain technology as an anticounterfeiting solution and high trust system of exchange. Luxury counterfeited brands offers a perspective which considers the complexities surrounding fashion consumption, the globalisation of brands, brand culture, and the connotations of luxury today, including its place in the criminological sphere. Academics call for studies pertaining to the under explored area of counterfeited luxury goods owing to a rise in the grey and copycat markets further catalysed by recent market demand for second-hand luxury goods (Wall and Large, 2010; Wang et al., 2020). The consumption of such goods not only pilfers innovation and affects industry but is entwined with a mirrored underworld of counterfeit production and consumption which has given rise to more sinister activities with linkages to organized crime, modern slavery, and terrorist activities. Against this backdrop, this research will seek to achieve the following research aims: A. Examine product counterfeiting of luxury goods as a social phenomenon a. Critically examine the socio-economic, historical, and cultural implications of counterfeiting. b. How are issues of copyright and trademark infringement impacting counterfeiters? B. Examine Blockchain as an anti-counterfeiting solution and its enhancement of supply chain management. a. Can Blockchain-based supply chains enable transparency and product traceability? i. Can the integration of a blockchain solve issues of provenance? ii. What is the value of blockchain-enabled services? iii. Identify threats to adoption and regulation of blockchain technologies in the UK. b. Can Blockchain enable a high-trust ecosystem? i. Does block-tech ensure accountability and create trust? ii. Examine the proposition that non-fungible tokens can create unprecedented models of ownership allowing for product circularity. The study seeks to unveil the shadow industry of counterfeiting’s impact and to assess blockchain technologies merit as an anti-counterfeiting solution via an examination of issues existing in luxury goods supply chains. Thomas’ (2019) description of fractured supply chains and the utilisation of sub-contracting via offshore producers are central to establishing a case for enterprise blockchain-based solutions to combat counterfeiting and to create transparent supply chains. To achieve the above-mentioned aims, this literature review will highlight the impact of product counterfeiting through the provision of an ontological examination of counterfeiting with a particular focus on luxury goods. The penultimate section offers a sociological examination of the luxury goods industry, anticounterfeiting measures and addresses inherent issues overlooked in studies regarding counterfeiting of luxury and their interrelationship. The final section of the literary review will provide a theoretical examination of blockchain technology (block-tech) within an epistemological framework to assess block-tech capability to enhance supply chains to foster transparent and traceable chains, and, in doing so ameliorate the effects and risks of counterfeiting within the global luxury goods industry. As this research is exploratory in nature, it will undertake a qualitative methodological approach, investigated through elite interviews and ethnographic data collection. The study will address this surge in the demand for counterfeit luxury goods and its accumulation into a trillion-dollar generating industry, as a social and criminological phenomenon. The researcher will examine issues pertaining to, and solutions of traceability, authentication, and supply chain provenance. In fulfilling the research objectives, it is imperative to identify current anti-counterfeiting strategies’ effectiveness through a critical and comparative examination, with a focus on the distributed ledger technology (DLT) known as Blockchain. Henceforth, blockchain will be referenced throughout as ‘block-tech’ and otherwise ‘the technology’ or ‘blockchain technology’, or on its own ‘blockchain’. Initial findings reveal the emergence of conscious consumers, a rise in re-commerce of luxury goods and a shift toward circularity within a microcosm of the industry