Critical Management Issues for Implementing RFID in Supply Chain Management

The benefits of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in the supply chain are fairly compelling. It has the potential to revolutionise the efficiency, accuracy and security of the supply chain with significant impact on overall profitability. A number of companies are actively involved in testing and adopting this technology. It is estimated that the market for RFID products and services will increase significantly in the next few years. Despite this trend, there are major impediments to RFID adoption in supply chain. While RFID systems have been around for several decades, the technology for supply chain management is still emerging. We describe many of the challenges, setbacks and barriers facing RFID implementations in supply chains, discuss the critical issues for management and offer some suggestions. In the process, we take an in-depth look at cost, technology, standards, privacy and security and business process reengineering related issues surrounding RFID technology in supply chains

Security and privacy for data mining of RFID-enabled product supply chains

The e-Pedigree used for verifying the authenticity of the products in RFID-enabled product supply chains plays a very important role in product anti-counterfeiting and risk management, but it is also vulnerable to malicious attacks and privacy leakage. While the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology bears merits such as automatic wireless identification without direct eye-sight contact, its security has been one of the main concerns in recent researches such as tag data tampering and cloning. Moreover, privacy leakage of the partners along the supply chains may lead to complete compromise of the whole system, and in consequence all authenticated products may be replaced by the faked ones! Quite different from other conventional databases, datasets in supply chain scenarios are temporally correlated, and every party of the system can only be semi-trusted. In this paper, a system that incorporates merits of both the secure multi-party computing and differential privacy is proposed to address the security and privacy issues, focusing on the vulnerability analysis of the data mining with distributed EPCIS datasets of e-pedigree having temporal relations from multiple range and aggregate queries in typical supply chain scenarios and the related algorithms. Theoretical analysis shows that our proposed system meets perfectly our preset design goals, while some of the other problems leave for future research

Towards A Sustainable and Ethical Supply Chain Management: The Potential of IoT Solutions

Globalization has introduced many new challenges making Supply chain management (SCM) complex and huge, for which improvement is needed in many industries. The Internet of Things (IoT) has solved many problems by providing security and traceability with a promising solution for supply chain management. SCM is segregated into different processes, each requiring different types of solutions. IoT devices can solve distributed system problems by creating trustful relationships. Since the whole business industry depends on the trust between different supply chain actors, IoT can provide this trust by making the entire ecosystem much more secure, reliable, and traceable. This paper will discuss how IoT technology has solved problems related to SCM in different areas. Supply chains in different industries, from pharmaceuticals to agriculture supply chain, have different issues and require different solutions. We will discuss problems such as security, tracking, traceability, and warehouse issues. All challenges faced by independent industries regarding the supply chain and how the amalgamation of IoT with other technology will be provided with solutions.Comment: 9 page

The Use of RFID Technologies for E-Enabling Logistics Supply Chains

"This book explores the creation of integrated supply chains, the developments of virtual business, and the processes of re-engineering for business development"--Provided by publisher

AnonPri: A Secure Anonymous Private Authentication Protocol for RFID Systems

Privacy preservation in RFID systems is a very important issue in modern day world. Privacy activists have been worried about the invasion of user privacy while using various RFID systems and services. Hence, significant efforts have been made to design RFID systems that preserve users\u27 privacy. Majority of the privacy preserving protocols for RFID systems require the reader to search all tags in the system in order to identify a single RFID tag which not efficient for large scale systems. In order to achieve high-speed authentication in large-scale RFID systems, researchers propose tree-based approaches, in which any pair of tags share a number of key components. Another technique is to perform group-based authentication that improves the tradeoff between scalability and privacy by dividing the tags into a number of groups. This novel authentication scheme ensures privacy of the tags. However, the level of privacy provided by the scheme decreases as more and more tags are compromised. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a group based anonymous private authentication protocol (AnonPri) that provides higher level of privacy than the above mentioned group based scheme and achieves better efficiency (in terms of providing privacy) than the approaches that prompt the reader to perform an exhaustive search. Our protocol guarantees that the adversary cannot link the tag responses even if she can learn the identifier of the tags. Our evaluation results demonstrates that the level of privacy provided by AnonPri is higher than that of the group based authentication technique

AnonPri: A Secure Anonymous Private Authentication Protocol for RFID Systems

Privacy preservation in RFID systems is a very important issue in modern day world. Privacy activists have been worried about the invasion of user privacy while using various RFID systems and services. Hence, significant efforts have been made to design RFID systems that preserve users\u27 privacy. Majority of the privacy preserving protocols for RFID systems require the reader to search all tags in the system in order to identify a single RFID tag which not efficient for large scale systems. In order to achieve high-speed authentication in large-scale RFID systems, researchers propose tree-based approaches, in which any pair of tags share a number of key components. Another technique is to perform group-based authentication that improves the tradeoff between scalability and privacy by dividing the tags into a number of groups. This novel authentication scheme ensures privacy of the tags. However, the level of privacy provided by the scheme decreases as more and more tags are compromised. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a group based anonymous private authentication protocol (AnonPri) that provides higher level of privacy than the above mentioned group based scheme and achieves better efficiency (in terms of providing privacy) than the approaches that prompt the reader to perform an exhaustive search. Our protocol guarantees that the adversary cannot link the tag responses even if she can learn the identifier of the tags. Our evaluation results demonstrates that the level of privacy provided by AnonPri is higher than that of the group based authentication technique

Automated Authentication and Authorisation of Consignors and their Consignments within Secure Supply Chains

In cross-border transport, in particular in air-transport, since 2010 there is the notion of a known consignor. This term is used in connection with an airfreight distribution company, which has introduced appropriate safety and security measures into its business process. Hence, its transport units are considered “safe” and can be handled with fewer overheads and more quickly. Due to the ever-increasing airfreight traffic, the notion of efficient security in airfreight is becoming increasingly pressing and requires information technical support to be able to handle shipments in time. In order to sustain security throughout entire supply chains all consignors should adhere to the same security standards – build a secure supply chain. This article presents methods and mechanisms for automated authentication and authorisation of known consignors and their transport units that enables swift identification and secure handover of shipments among known consignors and distribution centres. In their application they are not bound to air-transport and can be used to secure supply chains in general

From truth to trust: the impact of blockchain traceability on trust in product authenticity

In the global marketplace, customers are increasingly unaware of the source, provenance, and authenticity of products. Early research has shown that the introduction of blockchain technology into the supply chain area can make it more transparent and trustworthy. As a platform that supports distributed, cryptographically secure, auditable transactions, blockchain has expanded from the domain of digital cryptocurrency into the domain of physical asset provenance and ownership tracking and tracing. This research examines blockchain support of trust in product authenticity adopting a two-paper dissertation format. In the first conceptual paper, I develop a conceptual framework on blockchain technology\u27s unique features and characteristics and how it can boost trust in product authenticity. The second paper adopts the conceptual framework to test through a vignette experiment the effects of blockchain traceability, product identification, and the interaction between them on trust in product origin authenticity. Academics can use this research to develop new instruments to inform practice about how blockchain can boost trust in product authenticity. Results from this study can inform managers considering investments into blockchain solutions and unique product identification as a customer product authenticity, brand protection, or anti-counterfeiting strategy