Blockchain is a technology with unique combination of features such as decentralized structure, distributed notes and storage mechanism, consensus algorithm, smart contracting, and asymmetric encryption to ensure network security, transparency and visibility. Blockchain has immense potential to transform supply chain (SC) functions, from SC provenance, business process reengineering to security enhancement. More and more studies exploring the use of blockchain in SCs have appeared in recent years. In this paper, we consider a total of 178 articles and examine all the relevant research done in the field associated with the use of blockchain integration in SC operations. We highlight the corresponding opportunities, possible societal impacts, current state-of-the-art technologies along with major trends and challenges. We examine several industrial sectors such as shipping, manufacturing, automotive, aviation, finance, technology, energy, healthcare, agriculture and food, e-commerce, and education among others that can be successfully revamped with blockchain based technologies through enhanced visibility and business process management. A future research agenda is established which lays the solid foundation for further studies on this important emerging research area.

Blockchain technology in supply chain operations: Applications, challenges and research opportunities

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5/31324/01456901.pdf

Microelectronic circuits

Fundamentals Of Modern Vlsi Devices

Sustainability is a pressing need, as well as an engineering challenge, in the modern world. Developing smart technologies is a critical way to ensure that future manufacturing systems are sustainable. Blockchain is a next-generation development of information technology for realizing sustainability in businesses and industries. Much research on blockchain-empowered sustainable manufacturing in Industry 4.0 has been conducted from technical, commercial, organizational, and operational perspectives. This paper surveys how blockchain can overcome potential barriers to achieving sustainability from two perspectives, namely, the manufacturing system perspective and the product lifecycle management perspective. The survey first examines literature on these two perspectives, following which the state of research in blockchain-empowered sustainable manufacturing is presented, which sheds new light on urgent issues as part of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. We found that blockchain-empowered transformation of a sustainable manufacturing paradigm is still in an early stage of the hype phase, proceeding toward full adoption. The survey ends with a discussion of challenges regarding techniques, social barriers, standards, and regulations with respect to blockchain-empowered manufacturing applications. The paper concludes with a discussion of challenges and social barriers that blockchain technology must overcome to demonstrate its sustainability in industrial and business spheres.

Blockchain-empowered sustainable manufacturing and product lifecycle management in industry 4.0: A survey

This study aims to explore the current status, potential applications, and future directions of blockchain technology in supply chain management. A literature survey, along with an analytical review, of blockchain-based supply chain research was conducted to better understand the trajectory of related research and shed light on the benefits, issues, and challenges in the blockchain-supply-chain paradigm. A selected corpus comprising 106 review articles was analyzed to provide an overview of the use of blockchain and smart contracts in supply chain management. The diverse industrial applications of these technologies in various sectors have increasingly received attention by researchers, engineers, and practitioners. Four major issues: traceability and transparency, stakeholder involvement and collaboration, supply chain integration and digitalization, and common frameworks on blockchain-based platforms, are critical for future orientation. Traditional supply chain activities involve several intermediaries, trust, and performance issues. The potential of blockchain can be leveraged to disrupt supply chain operations for better performance, distributed governance, and process automation. This study contributes to the comprehension of blockchain applications in supply chain management and provides a blueprint for these applications from the perspective of literature analysis. Future efforts regarding technical adoption/diffusion, block-supply chain integration, and their social impacts were highlighted to enrich the research scope.

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When Blockchain Meets Supply Chain: A Systematic Literature Review on Current Development and Potential Applications

Research in the field of hardware Trojans has seen significant growth in the past decade. However, standard benchmarks to evaluate hardware Trojans and their detection are lacking. To this end, we have developed a suite of Trojans and ‘trust benchmarks’ (i.e., benchmark circuits with a hardware Trojan inserted in them) that can be used by researchers in the community to compare and contrast various Trojan detection techniques. In this paper, we present a comprehensive vulnerability analysis flow at various levels of abstraction of digital-design, that has been utilized to create these trust benchmarks. Further, we present a detailed evaluation of our benchmarks in terms of metrics such as Trojan detectability, and in the context of different attack models. Finally, we discuss future work such as automatic Trojan insertion into any arbitrary circuit.

Benchmarking of Hardware Trojans and Maliciously Affected Circuits

Logic locking has emerged as a promising technique for protecting gate-level semiconductor intellectual property. However, recent work has shown that such gate-level locking techniques are vulnerable to Boolean satisfiability (SAT) attacks. In order to thwart such attacks, several SAT-resistant logic locking techniques have been proposed, which minimize the discriminating ability of input patterns to rule out incorrect keys. In this work, we show that such SAT-resistant logic locking techniques have their own set of unique vulnerabilities. In particular, we propose a novel “bypass attack” that ensures the locked circuit works even when an incorrect key is applied. Such a technique makes it possible for an adversary to be oblivious to the type of SAT-resistant protection applied on the circuit, and still be able to restore the circuit to its correct functionality. We show that such a bypass attack is feasible on a wide range of benchmarks and SAT-resistant techniques, while incurring minimal run-time and area/delay overhead. Binary decision diagrams (BDDs) are utilized to analyze the proposed bypass attack and assess tradeoffs in security vs overhead of various countermeasures.

/pdf/novel-bypass-attack-and-bdd-based-tradeoff-analysis-against-1orlma7ll9.pdf

Novel Bypass Attack and BDD-based Tradeoff Analysis Against All Known Logic Locking Attacks

Electronic systems are ubiquitous today, playing an irreplaceable role in our personal lives, as well as in critical infrastructures such as power grids, satellite communications, and public transportation. In the past few decades, the security of software running on these systems has received significant attention. However, hardware has been assumed to be trustworthy and reliable “by default” without really analyzing the vulnerabilities in the electronics supply chain. With the rapid globalization of the semiconductor industry, it has become challenging to ensure the integrity and security of hardware. In this article, we discuss the integrity concerns associated with a globalized electronics supply chain. More specifically, we divide the supply chain into six distinct entities: IP owner/foundry (OCM), distributor, assembler, integrator, end user, and electronics recycler, and analyze the vulnerabilities and threats associated with each stage. To address the concerns of the supply chain integrity, we propose a blockchain-based certificate authority framework that can be used to manage critical chip information such as electronic chip identification, chip grade, and transaction time. The decentralized nature of the proposed framework can mitigate most threats of the electronics supply chain, such as recycling, remarking, cloning, and overproduction.

Electronics Supply Chain Integrity Enabled by Blockchain

Obfuscation is a promising solution for securing hardware intellectual property (IP) against various attacks, such as reverse engineering, piracy, and tampering. Due to the lack of standard benchmarks, proposed techniques by researchers and practitioners in the community are evaluated by existing benchmark suites such as ISCAS-85, ISCAS-89, and ITC-99. These open source benchmarks, though widely utilized, are not necessarily suitable for the purpose of evaluating hardware obfuscation techniques. In this context, we believe that it is important to establish a set of well-defined benchmarks, on which the effectiveness of new and existing obfuscation techniques and attacks on them can be compared. In this paper, we describe a set of such benchmarks obfuscated with some popular methods that we created to facilitate this need. These benchmarks have been made publicly available on Trust-Hub web portal. Moreover, we provide the first evaluation of several obfuscation approaches based on the metrics and existing attacks using this new suite. Finally, we discuss our observations and guidance for future work in hardware obfuscation and benchmarking.

/pdf/development-and-evaluation-of-hardware-obfuscation-26b5ly5cb6.pdf

Development and Evaluation of Hardware Obfuscation Benchmarks

Logic locking has recently been proposed as a solution for protecting gatelevel semiconductor intellectual property (IP). However, numerous attacks have been mounted on this technique, which either compromise the locking key or restore the original circuit functionality. SAT attacks leverage golden IC information to rule out all incorrect key classes, while bypass and removal attacks exploit the limited output corruptibility and/or structural traces of SAT-resistant locking schemes. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight locking technique: CAS-Lock (cascaded locking) which nullifies both SAT and bypass attacks, while simultaneously maintaining nontrivial output corruptibility. This property of CAS-Lock is in stark contrast to the well-accepted notion that there is an inherent trade-off between output corruptibility and SAT resistance. We theoretically and experimentally validate the SAT resistance of CAS-Lock, and show that it reduces the attack to brute-force, regardless of its construction. Further, we evaluate its resistance to recently proposed approximate SAT attacks (i.e., AppSAT). We also propose a modified version of CAS-Lock (mirrored CAS-Lock or M-CAS) to protect against removal attacks. M-CAS allows a trade-off evaluation between removal attack and SAT attack resiliency, while incurring minimal area overhead. We also show how M-CAS parameters such as the implemented Boolean function and selected key can be tuned by the designer so that a desired level of protection against all known attacks can be achieved.

Bicky Shakya

Papers

Benchmarking of Hardware Trojans and Maliciously Affected Circuits

Novel Bypass Attack and BDD-based Tradeoff Analysis Against All Known Logic Locking Attacks

Electronics Supply Chain Integrity Enabled by Blockchain

Development and Evaluation of Hardware Obfuscation Benchmarks

CAS-Lock: A Security-Corruptibility Trade-off Resilient Logic Locking Scheme