Reshaping the Cybersecurity for Health Supplements Supply Chain Using Blockchain-Based Traceability System

Abstract

Dietary supplements are products that are consumed by several people on a regular basis for a number of reasons. The inappropriate substances used to make these substandard or fake supplements have serious negative effects on health. Lack of transparency in the supply chain is the root cause of this fraudulence. A full-fledged traceability system is required to eliminate counterfeits from the supply chain and ensure the safety and legitimacy of the products. We present a traceability system in the form of an Android application with the Ethereum blockchain as the backend to provide traceability and transparency across the health supplements supply chain. It leverages smart contracts and provides immutable provenance data to all the stakeholders of the supply chain and eliminates the dependency on intermediaries. The detailed system architecture along with different smart contract algorithms used in our proposed system is presented. The cost analysis of the proposed system and the scalability it offers for supply chains other than health supplements is also discussed.