Proof‐of‐Stake Consensus Protocol for Cyber Supply Chain Data Provenance
Date
April 13, 2018
Description
Abstract
The globalization of cyber supply chain has resulted in software and firmware developed by offshore enterprises and has resulted in tremendous savings for the EDS sector. However, the dependency on thirdparty services has resulted in increase in threats across several stages in the cyber supply chain. We proposed a blockchain based data provenance technique that will allow end‐users can easily verify whether the purchased electronic component’s software or firmware in the EDS cyber supply chain is tampered or not. The proposed technique will leverage blockchain’s immutable distributed ledger capability to capture provenance and provide traceability and accountability. However, in order to fully exploit Blockchain’s capabilities, there is a need develop consensus protocols that balances the tradeoff between scalability and resilience.
We have developed a proof‐of‐stake (PoS)‐ based consensus protocol for securely recording the data operations occurring in a distributed system. Staking the distributed computing resources, the users can gain the privilege of becoming validators in the consensus process and the motivation of such participation can be either rewards, or achieving high security through collaborative provenance. The proposed leader election process ensures that every user gets a fair chance of leading the Blockchain based on the amount of staked resources. To validate the PoS‐based consensus protocol, we have developed a sandboxed environment on the Kubernetes platform and demonstrated the effectiveness of the protocol in ensuring validation time in the order of milliseconds in presence of variable network latency.