Provenance blockchain for ensuring IT security in cloud manufacturing

Provenance blockchain is an evolving concept for protection of production, logistics, and supply chain networks from rogue Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices. Such rogue IIoT devices are a recognized threat in the cloud manufacturing networks. In extreme cases, they can be used to cause industrial accidents. A brief version of provenance is about end-to-end tracking and tracing of data and the nodes involved in creating, modifying, transmitting, storing, and deleting it at specific times and locations. It provides an end-to-end verifiable and controlled computation for ensuring trustworthiness, quality, reliability, and validity of data. Provenance has existed in computing using logging software systems. This research is focused on threats to food supply chains between two countries. A scenario for protecting food supply chain from India to UAE has been modeled. This research recognized the threat of harmful food items getting mixed with flow of genuine products in a supply chain. The IIoT devices used to control the flow can be authenticated using the evolving provenance blockchain technology. With the help of recent design recommendations in the literature, a model design has been created and simulated in this research. Observations from the simulation revealed that TCP congestions and unpredictable turnaround time for assigning cryptographic keys to IIoT device sessions may have to be explored in future. A collaborative design between the two nations has been proposed. All IIoT devices not supporting cryptography will be eliminated from the cloud manufacturing and supply chain networks. Currently, this design may be used for one time registration only. Future studies may provide improved versions in which, repeated authentication and keys replacements may be implemented.