ECHAIN: Securing Electronic Device Provenance through Privacy-Preserving Consortium Blockchains

A conventional electronic device provenance is vulnerable to several attacks due to the limited traceability of transactions and a lack of unclonable device identities. Although electronic chip identification (ECID) has been suggested to improve security, discussion on ECID data management and users' privacy preservation in such a decentralized device provenance management system is insufficient. In this work, we propose a framework named ECHAIN. The novelties include: (1) it uses uniquely hashed electronic chip identification (ECIDs) to maintain the security of sensitive ECID data; (2) it allows most transactions processed in parallel with a part of blockchain nodes participating to maximize the system efficiency; and (3) it employs ECID-based PKI keyless encryption to protect users' privacy from the blockchain system. A prototype system is implemented and deployed on a 58-node consortium blockchain. Compared with the conventional solutions, experiments show that ECHAIN incurs less than 10% overhead when registering electronic devices while delivering up to 5x higher transaction throughput.