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Contribution Details
| Type | Bachelor's Thesis |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Title | Design and Implementation of a SC-based System for the Tracking within a Cheese Supply Chain |
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| Institution | University of Zurich |
| Faculty | Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics |
| Date | 2022 |
| Abstract Text | With a major part of the Swiss cheese produced being exported, counterfeit cheeses selling under their protected name abroad pose a serious economic threat to the Swiss cheese industry. Consequently, a group of Swiss private and federal entities have teamed up to build the CheeseChain, a blockchain-based solution to increase transparency and trust along the Tˆete-de-Moine (a Swiss cheese) value chain, as well as provide proof-of-origin using a PCR-based system and publish the results to the public Blockchain (BC). This thesis presents a smart contract (SC) solution to track a cheese through its supply chain including a frontend to facilitate interactions with the SC and a server that allows data from the existing systems to be written to the BC via network requests. The SC abstracts a supply chain into supply chain participants, production batches, and individual production steps that are appended to a batch, which makes the SC applicable to supply chain tracking use cases other than cheese with only minimal modifications of the source code. This is achieved using custom data structures, called structs, for production batches and steps, where every batch contains the timestamp of creation, further information about the product, and a pointer to the last step performed within the supply chain and registered on the batch. Each step itself points to its predecessor and stores a description of the step, the participant who performed the step, the timestamp, and the coordinates alongside. This forms an immutable and append-only backward traceable linked list of steps that can be inspected via the custom frontend designed for manual interaction with the SC by supply chain participants and the retrieval of supply chain history for a specific cheese by the customer allowing for verification of a product’s authenticity. Further, the SC implements an access control mechanism that guards all functions that change the SC’s state. All functions are only callable by registered supply chain participants, which are managed by the system administrator, who is at the same time the deployer of the contract and the only entity that is allowed to call all available functions. The server provides an abstraction over the SC and facilitates injecting data available in a private system to be written into the BC automatically through an API. Evaluating the system has shown that choosing the best suitable BC for a specific application has to be done diligently and carefully since it directly implies the system’s performance and operational costs, which depend on the selected BC’s block time, respectively token and gas price. Further, the presented SC is evaluated to carry a low risk from a SC security standpoint, due to the access control mechanism in place and the absence of monetary incentives to exploit the system. The biggest security risk is introduced by the mismanagement and leakage of private keys by the registered supply chain participants or the administrator, which gives the holder the ability to write faulty information into the SC. |
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