Blockchain-Based Supply Chain for a Sustainable Digital Society: Security Challenges and Proposed Approach

Blockchain technology is a distributed digital ledger in a decentralized network that offers immutability, security, and transparency in various applications among digital societies. The consensus mechanism is the defining technology behind the security and performance of the Blockchain system. Under the Industrial Revolution 4.0, blockchain has been considered for integration into supply chain business as an innovative solution to tackle the challenges of traceability, transparency, lack of trust, and data counterfeiting in digital supply chain management. A private permissioned Blockchain is the most suitable type of Blockchain for Supply Chain Management (SCM) as it promises better performance with high throughput and low latency. However, private Blockchains that use the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism have low-security capabilities and are more vulnerable to cyber-attacks triggered by malicious nodes. In this paper, we outline the research challenges from the security aspect towards the integration of Blockchain with SCM. Then we design an approach for a private Blockchain-based Supply Chain with security capabilities by proposing an enhancement consensus model to the BFT consensus mechanism for identifying and terminating malicious nodes in the consensus process. The performance of the proposed approach will be validated experimentally and compared against Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). The proposed approach is expected to prevent security attacks on the consensus mechanism, thereby improving the security and performance of the Blockchain system.