Secure End-to-End Sensing in Supply Chains

Jan Pennekamp, Fritz Alder, Roman Matzutt, Jan Tobias Mühlberg, Frank Piessens, Klaus Wehrle

Trust along digitalized supply chains is challenged by the aspect that monitoring equipment may not be trustworthy or unreliable as respective measurements originate from potentially untrusted parties. To allow for dynamic relationships along supply chains, we propose a blockchain-backed supply chain monitoring architecture utilizing trusted hardware. Our design provides a notion of secure end-to-end sensing of interactions even when originating from untrusted surroundings. Due to attested checkpointing, we can identify misinformation early on and reliably pinpoint the origin. A blockchain enables long-term verifiability for all (trusted) measurements within our system even if issues are detected only after the fact. Our feasibility study and cost analysis further show that our design is indeed deployable in and applicable to today’s supply chain settings.