RF-Chain: Decentralized, Credible, and Counterfeit-proof Supply Chain Management with Commodity RFIDs

Blockchain-based supply chains provide a new solution to decentralized multi-party product management. However, existing methods, including ID-based and cryptographic-based solutions, cannot achieve both counterfeit resistance and decentralization in supply chain management. We argue that this dilemma comes from the disconnection and inconsistency of the data records and physical product entities. This paper proposes RF-Chain, a novel decentralized supply chain management solution that uniquely combines data record authentication and physical-layer RFID tag authentication to effectively achieve credibility and counterfeit resistance. The main contribution of this work is to integrate physical-layer authentication of cheap commodity RFID tags into a blockchain-based information management system, and RF-Chain is the first to do so. The proposed cross-layer authentication can effectively defend against counterfeit attacks without relying on a central key management service. Real-world experiments utilizing the Ethereum (ETH) platform and more than 100 RFID tags demonstrate that RF-Chain is secure, effective, time-efficient, and cost-efficient.