SBIR Phase I: Blockchain for Supply Chain

Skuchain, Inc., Mountain View CA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to facilitate faster and safer transactions for manufactured goods. Current Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are based on relatively old technology. The proposed project develops a new platform for the supply chain to operate efficiently using blockchain technology for a scalable, secure, and interoperable solution. The SBIR Phase I project addresses three principal technical challenges of a blockchain commercial solution, namely scalability, security and interoperability. For scalability, the core technical requirement is to provision, maintain and periodically rotate hierarchical and deterministic public/ private key-pairs used to sign transactions and usable by non-technical users. Security research will focus on providing each organization/ participant the ability to provide granular access to field-level data to others in the ecosystem. The project will use an Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) protocol to encrypt each field with its own key-pair. The system will use a blockchain smart contract to provide trustable decryption based on access control policies set by the submitter. The project’s interoperability will focus on the ability to share data between different blockchain networks as well as between traditional ERP systems and a blockchain network by developing an interoperability protocol that securely transfers the record and ensures that double-spend type attacks are not possible. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.