Design and Simulation-Based Evaluation of a Blockchain-Enabled Supply Chain Security Framework with Cryptographic Authentication

Abstract

Supply chains face growing cyber threats, including identity spoofing, unauthorized access, transaction tampering, counterfeit product insertion, and data breaches, driven by increasing digital interconnectivity across supply chain operations. Traditional centralized supply chain systems often lack the transparency, traceability, and security controls needed to mitigate these threats. This study designs a blockchain-enabled supply chain security framework that layers advanced cryptographic authentication — Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), AES-256-GCM encryption, SHA-256 hashing, and smart contracts — on a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric target architecture, with the aim of enhancing the confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and traceability of supply chain transactions. A Design Science Research (DSR) methodology guided the design and evaluation of the framework for a simulated supply chain comprising suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, logistics providers, retailers, and consumers. Because a production Hyperledger Fabric deployment was not accessible for this study, the framework's specified cryptographic and ledger operations ECDSA authentication, AES-256-GCM encryption, SHA-256 hash-chaining, a simulated PKI certificate registry, and a simulated MFA gate — were instead implemented and evaluated through a concurrent, in-memory Python simulation under representative workloads. Within this simulation, authentication success rates exceeded 99.4%,the ledger sustained a simulated commit throughput of up to 11,300 transactions per second with commit latency below 4 ms, and the framework achieved attack detection rates of 100% with prevention rates between 96.0% and 100% against six pre-defined, scripted attack scenarios (replay attacks, identity spoofing, unauthorized access, transaction tampering, man-in-the-middle attacks, and counterfeit product insertion; 50 trials per scenario)