SPUFChain: Permissioned Blockchain Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Supply Chain Management Using PUF of IoT

The complexity of the entire process of supply chain management (SCM) is quite cumbersome and traditional way of handling it is devoid of proper authentication and security and very often suffers from human errors in dealing with flaws in quality control process of SCM. While it may have started with shipment tracking, the outcome of using IoT on supply chains has spread to every link in the chain. For instance, manufacturers are employing Internet-enabled sensors in production to find product faults, resulting in higher-quality production runs. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is a defense countermeasure that exploits the exclusive, unrepeatable features of hardware components to generate distinct cryptographic keys or identifiers, typically for a semiconductor device like an Internet of Things (IoT) device. The distinctive proof of identity of IoT devices in the supply chain is employed by means of PUFs as inviolable IDs. Blockchain, the distributed, immutable ledger, on the other hand is the disruptive technology that provides higher security as compared to traditional centralized systems. The integration of PUF and blockchain proves to be quite interesting while handling the above issues of authentication. A smart contract on the blockchain is a software code that executes spontaneously as and when the conditions of the contract or agreement are satisfied. Hence after authentication process the results are fed to blockchain smart contract for the final validation. This paper presents a novel permissioned blockchain smart contract-based lightweight authentication scheme for SCM using PUF of IoT known as SPUFChain. Informal and formal security analysis (using AVISPA and BAN logic) of the proposed framework show its efficiency to resist several threat scenarios like man-in-the middle, non-repudiation, impersonation, replay attacks and many other security features as compared to other related schemes. The processing time (~13.8ms) is better than existing lightweight scheme for blockchain-based SCM as well.