Blockchain based secured information sharing protocol in supply chain management system with key distribution mechanism

The concept of Supply Chain Management (SCM) is very imperative while moving sensitive products from one entity to the next entity until it reaches to the end-users to avoid damage(s) in the product. In the traditional supply chain management system, several serious problems such as tampering of products, delay, and fraud, etc. exist. It also lacks proper authentication among the participants, data management as well as the integrity of the data. The blockchain mechanism is capable of solving the above-mentioned issues due to its important features such as decentralization, transparency, trust-less environment, anonymity, and immutability. This paper describes how the blockchain mechanism combines with the traditional pharmaceutical supply chain system and to achieve a better SCM system, we present a blockchain-based scheme for information sharing securely in the pharmaceutical supply chain system with smart contracts and consensus mechanism. The proposed scheme also provides a mechanism to distribute required cryptographic keys to all the participants securely using the smart contract technique. Further, transaction and block validation protocols have been designed in our protocol. The security analysis ensures that our protocol is robust and also achieves reasonable performance in terms of computation and communication overheads. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.