Abstract
The world which we now live in has never been more convenient than ever before. Thanks to the advancements in science and technology, supply chains have played an integral role in our lives and are inseparable from how our everyday processes work: from the provision of electricity, water and finished goods. To further enhance such processes, extensive research has focused on the adoption of blockchain technology, which found its beginnings with the use of Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, for use with supply chains. This work encompasses experience gained from industry and research, as well as pivotal events which impacted both supply chains and blockchains. These include: 1) the rise of altcoins, which claims to rival both dominating blockchains by market cap. 2) the rise of alternate use cases for blockchains such as digital collectables, or better known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) - a digital representation of an asset which provides traceability due to the nature of blockchain technology. 3) both COVID-19, declared as a pandemic, and the Russia-Ukraine, Israli-Hamas wars have shown how existing supply chains are vulnerable over the years: worldwide chip shortages, manpower constraints, its reliance on existing processes and inflexibility to quickly recover from bottlenecks despite technological advancements. 4) increasing number of sophisticated cyber attacks on both blockchains and supply chains, despite decades of security advisories and experience to defend against such attacks. Firstly, we study existing cybersecurity standards and attempt to map them to the blockchain for supply chains wishing to deploy a blockchain securely through SuppliedTrust, a framework consisting of a 3-layered mapping process. Secondly, we demonstrate how we map an electronic bill of lading (eBL), an important document needed for shipping across countries as a NFT, to interact with different stakeholders and discover potential use cases for supply chains using the blockchain. Lastly, we perform a deep dive into the current blockchain ecosystem, discover weaknesses in existing implementations which prevent the adoption of blockchain technology into supply chains and attempt to move towards atomicity and composability in cross-chain NFTs. We collected 480k NFTs in over 50 collections to identify potential high-value threats and optimize the process of detecting off-chain duplicates across siloed blockchains.