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Blockchain-based Agri-Food Supply Chain: A
Complete Solution

By
Affaf Shahid
CIIT/SP17-RSE-002/ISB

MS Thesis
In
Software Engineering

COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad - Pakistan

Fall, 2019
i
 COMSATS University Islamabad

Blockchain-based Agri-Food Supply Chain: A

Complete Solution

A Thesis Presented to

COMSATS University Islamabad

In partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree of

MS (Software Engineering)

By
Affaf Shahid
CIIT/SP17-RSE-002/ISB

Fall, 2019
ii
 Blockchain-based Agri-Food Supply Chain: A
Complete Solution

A Post Graduate Thesis submitted to the Department of Computer Science as

partial fulfilment of the requirement for the award of Degree of MS (Software
Engineering).

Name Registration Number

Affaf Shahid CIIT/SP17-RSE-002/ISB

Supervisor:

Dr. Nadeem Javaid,

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science,
COMSATS University Islamabad,
Islamabad, Pakistan

Co-Supervisor:

Dr. Zahoor Ali Khan,

Assistant Professor/Division Chair, Computer Information Science,
Higher Colleges of Technology, Fujairah, United Arab Emirates
iii
 Final Approval

This thesis titled

Blockchain-based Agri-Food Supply Chain: A Complete Solution

By
Affaf Shahid
CIIT/SP17-RSE-002/ISB

has been approved

For the COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad

External Examiner:

Supervisor:
Dr. Nadeem Javaid
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science,
COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad

Co-Supervisor:
Dr. Zahoor Ali Khan,
Assistant Professor/Division Chair, Computer Information Science,
Higher Colleges of Technology, Fujairah, United Arab Emirates

HoD:
Dr. Mansoor Ahmed
Assistant Professor, Department. of Computer Science,
COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad
iv
 Declaration

I Affaf Shahid (Registration No. CIIT/SP17-RSE-002/ISB) hereby declare that I

have produced the work presented in this thesis, during the scheduled period of
study. I also declare that I have not taken any material from any source except
referred to wherever due that amount of plagiarism is within acceptable range. If
a violation of HEC rules on research has occurred in this thesis, I shall be liable
to punishable action under the plagiarism rules of the HEC.

Date: December 06, 2019

Affaf Shahid
CIIT/SP17-RSE-002/ISB

v
 Certificate

It is certified that Affaf Shahid (Registration No. CIIT/SP17-RSE-002/ISB) has

carried out all the work related to this thesis under my supervision at the Depart-
ment of Computer Science, COMSATS University, Islamabad and the work fulfills
the requirement for award of MS degree.

Date: December 06, 2019

Supervisor:

Dr. Nadeem Javaid

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Co-Supervisor:

Dr. Zahoor Ali Khan

Assistant Professor/Division Chair, Computer Information

Head of Department:

Dr. Mansoor Ahmad

Department of Computer Science

vi
 DEDICATION

Dedicated
to my mentor Dr. Nadeem Javaid, loving Parents and my sisters
who equipped me with pearls of knowledge and showed me the way
of spiritual and personal enlightenment in this world and the world
hereafter.

vii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First of all, thanks to Allah Almighty who give me strength and confidence to
complete this dissertation. After that, I would like to express my profound appre-
ciation to many people who supported me during my MS and who helped me to
complete my thesis. Their generous support made this research work possible

Firstly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Nadeem

Javaid for the continuous support of my MS study and related research, for his
patience, motivation and immense knowledge. His guidance helped me in all the
time of research and writing of this thesis. I could not have imagined having a
better advisor and mentor for my MS study. I am truly indebted to him for his
knowledge, thoughts and friendship.

I would like to thank my parents and my fiance Umair Sarfraz for their continuous
support, understanding and assistance whenever I needed them throughout my MS
studies and research work. Furthermore, I would like to thank my sisters Sundus
Tokir, Ayesha Adeel and my brother Suleman Shahid. I believe that without their
motivation, it is not possible to succeed throughout my life. I am always grateful
to them for their encouragement and support.

Last but not the least, I am greatly thankful to Ms. Adia Khalid, Ms. Sakeena
Javaid and Fatima Tariq for their continuous support and help in my research
work. Finally, I am also thankful to all my colleagues at CUI for providing me the
warm and friendly atmosphere.

viii
 ABSTRACT
Blockchain-based Agri-Food Supply Chain: A Complete
Solution
Supply chains are evolving into automated and highly complex networks and are
becoming an important source of potential benefits in the modern world. How-
ever, it is challenging to track the provenance of data and maintain traceability
throughout the network. Consumers are now more interested in food’s and prod-
uct’s quality. The traditional supply chains are centralized and they depend on
third party for trading. The traditional centralized systems lack transparency,
accountability and auditability. In our proposed solution, we have presented a
complete 1 solution for blockchain-based Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) sup-
ply chain. It leverages the key features of blockchain and smart contracts deployed
over ethereum blockchain network. Although blockchain provides an immutable
network for supply chain events, it still lacks in solving major problems like ac-
countability, traceability and credibility of supply chain events. Therefore, there
is a need of reliable system that ensures traceability, trust, trading and delivery
mechanism in Agri-Food supply chain. All transactions in the proposed scheme
are uploaded to blockhain; while, it ultimately uploads the data to Interplanetry
File Storage System (IPFS). The storage system returns a hash of the data which
is stored on blockchain and ensures efficient, secure and reliable solution. Futher-
more, simulations and evaluation of smart contracts along with the secuirty and
vulnerability analyses are also presented in this work.

1
Completeness of the solution refers to fact that it provides an end to end solution for all the
processes in Agri-Food supply chain

ix
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication vii

Acknowledgements viii

Abstract ix

List of Figures xi

List of Tables xii

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1.1 Organization of Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2 Literature Review and Problem Statement 6

2.1 Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2 Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

3 System Model and Proposed Methodology 11

3.0.1 Traceability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.0.2 Trading and Delivery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.0.3 Reputation System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

4 Simulation Results and Discussions 18

4.1 Simulations Results and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
4.2 Security Analyses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4.2.1 Vulnerability and Robustness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4.2.2 Security Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
4.2.2.1 Accountability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
4.2.2.2 Credibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
4.2.2.3 Auditability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.2.2.4 Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.2.2.5 Authenticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

5 Conclusion and Future Work 27

5.1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
5.2 Future work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

6 References 29

x
LIST OF FIGURES

3.1 Blockchain-based End to End Solution for Agri-Food Supply Chain 13

3.2 Trading and Delivery Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.3 Reputation System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

4.1 Gas Consumption of Reputation System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

4.2 Gas Consumption against Input String Length . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4.3 Mining Time against Different Input Length . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4.4 Gas Consumption of Smart Contracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4.5 No. of Products vs Gas Consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4.6 Vulnerability Analysis of Smart Contracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

xi
LIST OF TABLES

4.1 Smart Contracts Cost Test (gasprice= 1 Gwei, 1 ether = 176.52

USD). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
4.2 Comparison of Proposed Solution with Existing Techniques . . . . . 24

xii
 Chapter 1

Introduction

1
Chapter 1 1.1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction
The Supply Chain Management (SCM) is a group of processes and sub-processes
carried out for maximizing customer value and achieving a maintainable competi-
tive advantage. The supply chain activities involve the flow of goods and services
to transform a raw material into a final refined product. It is also interpreted as
a network of entities that are part of the system from production to trading. The
whole supply chain network is divided into several stages. Processes involved in
these stages often take months to complete. In such situation, if the final prod-
uct lacks in quality, it becomes extremely difficult to track the root cause of the
problem. The demands for top quality products and interest of end consumers in
the provenance of data is increasing rapidly. Therefore, it has become a requisite
need for every supply chain system to track the movement of products from origin
to the end consumers [1].

To gain end consumers trust, the supply chain authorities have to be efficient and
accurate in delivering information. It is also important for supply chain author-
ities to comply with quality, integrity and credibility of the entire supply chain
process. Regulatory authorities have enforced standards for improving quality,
transparency and security for supply chain traceability systems. These standards
are strictly enforced by the governments of several countries. Canadian govern-
ment has enforced the use of tags and bar codes to identify the provenance of
products. Similar enforcement is also imposed by the Chinese government [2].
The aim of these regulations is to improve transparency of the traceability sys-
tems and to ensure high quality of products.

In addition to the responsibility of maintaining traceability, supply chain systems

also act as a gateway for trading products. These systems process huge amount
of transaction data and thus add more complexity to the network architecture of
supply chain systems. These networks are generally centralized so, there is a risk
involved for false or inaccurate representation of information [3]. Supply chains
allowing financial transactions on their networks, lack trust and credibility due to
their centralized service architecture. Moreover, the centralized storage schemes
used in supply chain networks are often unable to handle large amount of data
leading to unavoidable bottlenecks and therefore, affect the overall performance of
these networks.

Distributed systems offer fault tolerance, scalability, concurrent processing and

better storage schemes. The emergence of blockchain as a base technology of

2 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 1 1.1. INTRODUCTION

Bitcoin is recognized by several industries around the globe, e.g., finance, Elec-
tronic Medical Records (EMRs), Internet of Things (IoT), energy and many more.
Blockchain is a secure system that overcomes aforementioned risks through its fea-
tures like immutability, transparency, traceability and security. Bitcoin, the decen-
tralized peer-to-peer digital currency is the most popular application that is based
on blockchain technology [4]. However, the current Bitcoin network is not a one-
size-fit all solution, especially for data-driven domains as it faces latency, storage
and throughput issues [5]. Several network architectures and distributed consensus
protocols that keep the integrity of a blockchain while enabling high throughput
and improved storage capabilities have been explored in literature. Similarly, an
efficient monitoring of production of Agri-Food products is critical in terms of
product safety. The growing concerns of consumers and government regarding
food quality have also renewed the concept of traceability in supply-chain. The
traditional supply-chains suffer with centralization and become vulnerable both in
terms of management and data modification. However, blockchain plays a signif-
icant role in evolution of supply chain with its inherent properties. Moreover, it
also provides smart contracts leveraging safe trading transactions among systems.
Despite of the trust less nature of blockchain-based Agri-Food chains, it is hard for
the end-consumers to trust the product owner and quality of the product before
performing a transaction.

Additionally, the traditional centralized storage schemes are unable to handle large
amount of data produced during supply chain processes and consequently cause
bottleneck. Therefore, several decentralized storage schemes are proposed in lit-
erature to overcome the issues like high latency, low throughput and bottlenecks.
In [6], a blockchain-based soybean traceability scheme is proposed. The solution
uses ethereum smart contracts and Interplanetary File Storage System (IPFS) to
achieve complete traceability. The storage medium is IPFS 1 . IPFS uses the tech-
nologies like an incentivized block exchange and Distributed Hash Table (DHT). In
IPFS, nodes do not trust each other and there is no single point of failure. However,
the data stored in IPFS gets available if the hash of the data is available. IPFS
nodes also act selfishly while backing up data. Additionally, authors in [6] have
not considered the accountability and auditability of trading and delivery data.
Moreover, as Agri-Food supply chains are moving towards e-agriculture; therefore,
there’s a need of decentralized automated payment mechanism, which ensures that
the entities in entire system adhere to the commitment during transaction. While,
authors in [7] proposed an efficient storage scheme for Agri-Food tracking. The
1
A popular, decentralized, peer-to-peer file storage system.

3 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 1 1.1. INTRODUCTION

transaction hash in the proposed solution is stored in a secondary database. To

retrieve data from IPFS, the transaction hash is accessed from secondary database.
Using that transaction hash, IPFS hash is retrieved from the blockchain. However,
if the secondary database fails, whole system will fail. Similarly, [8] proposed an
auditable protocol for transparent and tamper proof transactions between trading
entities. The trading entities are product owner, logistics company and consumers.
However, authors have not considered credibility of merchants and trust between
trading entities. Therefore, to overcome aforementioned issues, our thesis aims
to contribute in the growing work on blockchain-based Agri-Food supply chains
and provides an end to end solution. To the best of our knowledge, there is no
existing work in literature that provides a complete solution for Agri-food supply
chain. However, this thesis is an extension of blockchain-based reputation system
proposed in [9]. The proposed solution uses ethereum smart contracts to assure
an efficient, secure and trusted environment for the trading entities. It maintains
the integrity and immutability of the reviews registered through smart contract.
It also provides a detailed performance analysis of the proposed scheme in terms
of gas required. The main contributions of the proposed system are as follows.

• It serves as an end-to-end distributed supply chain system that introduces

1) a traceability scheme and trading and delivery mechanism, 2) a reputa-
tion system for credibility assurance of the entities and 3) an autonomous
transaction system.

• It achieves the desired properties of accountability, credibility, auditability,

autonomy and authenticity.

• It acts as a better alternative to the existing Agri-Food supply chain systems

enabling a scalable and auditable system. We evaluate our proposed system
in terms of ether gas and cost using the smart contracts over the ethereum
network.

• It is resilient against well-known attacks and provides inherent important

security features. We perform a detailed vulnerability assessment of our sys-
tem and discuss how our system ensures security against malicious attacks.

1.1.1 Organization of Thesis

The remainder of the thesis is organized as follows: Related Work and problem
statement is presented in Chapter 2. Detailed system model is described in Chap-
ter 3. Simulations’ results and vulnerability analyses are provided in Chapter 4.

4 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 1 1.1. INTRODUCTION

Finally, Chapter 5 concludes the thesis and discusses limitations.

5 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

 Chapter 2

Literature Review and Problem Statement

6
Chapter 2 2.1. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Literature Review

In this section, we discuss and analyze related schemes proposed for improvement
of Agri-Food supply chain system and accentuate the differences to our proposed
solution, as sketched in Table 4.2.

Food safety in recent times is a growing concern for commercial and academic in-
dustries. Most of the solutions till date are centralized and result in serious prob-
lems such as fraud , tampering and man-in-the-middle attack. Therefore, literature
has introduced several blockchain-based traceability and information security in
Agri-Food supply chain systems. Hereof, author in [10] has proposed a trace-
ability scheme based on Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP),
blockchain and IoT. Furthermore, blockchain along with its advantages has some
disadvantages as well, i.e., it lacks scalability when data increases to a certain
level. In this regard, BigChainDB is used to fill the gap, which provides a scalable
solution. The proposed solution is then applied to an example scenario to show
the significant transparency and efficiency and how it favours HACCP regulations.
However, the proposed scheme does not specify the current ownership details of
products. In addition to this, a case study on product traceability is presented
in [11]. According to the authors, tracing the provenance of products in supply
chain must be transparent, tamper-proof and adaptive to the changing environ-
ments. Therefore, they have designed an origin-chain that uses private and public
blockchain. As blockchain has limited storage, origin-chain stores the data on-
chain and off-chain. On-chain storage includes the hashes of data while, off-chain
storage has the raw files and addresses of smart contracts. The authors have also
provided a case study with actual implementation and deployment of origin-chain
in industry. Additionally, they have also discussed the adaptability of the solution
and concluded that the blockchain is a good option for traceability in SCM. How-
ever, security and privacy are the main concerns. In this regard, authors in[12]
have introduced blockchain-based food information security in SCM. According to
them, a no. of solutions have been provided to achieve traceability. However, these
solutions are not able to achieve accurate traceability required for Chinese mar-
ket.Based on the hypothetical conclusions and analysis, authors have provided a
more reliable and efficient solutions. However, the practical implementation of the
whole solution still lacks behind. In [13], authors have proposed blockchain-based
decentralized traceability process and provided a case study. However, auditability
and integrity is compromised. Considering the food safety issues, blockchain and

7 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 2 2.1. LITERATURE REVIEW

IoT based solution is proposed for Agri-Food supply chain and information secu-
rity [14]. They created a use case for traceability of product from farm to the table
and compared the results using different implementation platforms, i.e. ethereum
and hyperledger. Authors in [15] reviewed the concepts of information and com-
munication technology and blockchain. They proposed an e-agriculture system
and evaluation tool. This system can be used to get the certain requirements
for blockchain-based agriculture systems. However, the proposed system lacks in
terms of practical implementation and feasibility of applying in real-environment.
Authors have proposed a blockchain-based anonymity preserving delivery mech-
anism for physical items in [16]. They have achieved anonymity, fairness and
unlinkability of buyers and sellers. However, authors compromised the account-
ability of the entities involved. Authors in [17] have tackled the problem of some
how cloning the RFID tags post delivery. In this regards, they used bitcoin’s
blockchain and implemented proof-of-concept. After the performance evaluation
of the system, authors concluded that the cost of managing product ownership is
reduced to 1 USD for almost six transfers.

In traditional storage schemes, the data is stored in centralized storage. After

the invention of blockchain, many decentralized storage systems are used to store
the data in a decentralized manner. In [7], authors proposed an efficient storage
scheme for Agri-Food product tacking. Authors used IPFS along with secondary
database to achieve the traceability. IPFS is a network used to store and share
data in a decentralized file system. To retrieve data from IPFS, the transaction
hash is accessed from secondary database. Using that transaction hash, IPFS hash
is retrieved from the blockchain. However, if the secondary database fails, whole
system will fail. Authors in [6] have proposed an approach for efficient transactions
of soybean traceability in Agri-Food supply chain. The proposed solution over-
comes the problems of centralized solutions and eliminates the need for a trusted
third party. It maintains high integrity, reliability and more security. However, au-
thors have not considered the accountability and auditability of the data delivered
and automated payments. Authors have proposed a proof of delivery mechanism
to deliver physical assets between multiple transporters in [18]. In the proposed
solution, all the entities act honestly by incentivizing the trading entities. Auto-
mated payments through ethers are also part of the proposed solution. However,
the proposed scheme has used a key and asset while transporting the asset. The
key and the asset delivered have no relation between them and as a result, trans-
porters can easily tamper the asset to be delivered. Paper [8] has proposed an

8 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 2 2.1. LITERATURE REVIEW

auditable protocol for transparent, tamper-proof and verifiable transactions be-

tween entities. It has also proposed a pre-verification technique to overcome the
limitation in paper [18] However, credibility of merchants is not considered. In [19],
a decentralized storage mechanism along with ethereum blockchain is proposed.
The paper aims at overcoming the risks of centralized storage, i.e., leakage of the
sensitive data and a single point of failure. The decentralized storage mechanism
used is IPFS. In the proposed framework, before storing the data in IPFS, the
file is encrypted using a file encryption algorithm. The ciphertext obtained after
encryption is uploaded to IPFS. IPFS provides the hash of the stored file which
is recorded in ethereum blockchain. However, the proposed solution if applied in
Internet of Things (IoT) scenario, will not work efficiently because of the increased
computational overhead. The authors in [3] have proposed an approach for trust-
less privacy preserving reputation system. The proposed solution maintains the
anonymous ratings of products and provides the correctness and security analysis
of the proposed scheme. However, no performance analysis is provided that is
required to guarantee efficiency of token generation. Additionally, there is no link
between the ratings and the transactions and are consequently prone to malicious
users. In [20], authors have discussed the existing and proposed solutions that
work on maintaining trust and reputation while performing online transactions.
The authors have then proposed an agenda for reputation systems. Every on-
line transactional platform has the problem of truthfulness between the seller and
buyer. This is for the reason that the both parties do not directly meet to perform
the transaction. Therefore, a review system is required that maintains the sellers
reviews against his profile and helps buyers to evaluate the seller and products be-
forehand. A blockchain-based reputation system is proposed in [21]. The proposed
solution provides data credibility in the vehicular networks. Each message that
is transfered from one entity to another is reviewed on the basis of environment
traffic. Each review is then blocked and chained in the network. Based on these
reviews, the vehicles are able to trust the messages obtained. However, the cred-
ibility of the entities that transfer messages is not maintained. Concluding from
the above literature, use of blockchain in agriculture based supply chain system
is growing exponentially. It is adopted to enhance the transparency, traceability
and food safety issues in the present supply chain systems. Therefore, by getting
the motivation from the above literature, we have proposed a blockchain-based
solution for maintaining accountability, auditability and credibility in Agri-Food
supply chain systems.

9 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 2 2.2. PROBLEM STATEMENT

2.2 Problem Statement

In [6], a blockchain-based soybean traceability scheme is proposed. The solution
uses ethereum smart contracts and Interplanetary File Storage System (IPFS) to
achieve complete traceability. The storage medium is IPFS. In IPFS, nodes do
not trust each other and there is no single point of failure. However, the data
stored in IPFS gets available if the hash of the data is available. Additionally,
authors in [6] have not considered the accountability and auditability of trading
and delivery data. Moreover, as Agri-Food supply chains are moving towards
e-agriculture; therefore, there’s a need of decentralized automated payment mech-
anism, which ensures that the entities in entire system adhere to the commitment
during transaction. While, authors in [7] proposed an efficient storage scheme
for Agri-Food tracking. In this scheme, the transaction hash is stored in a sec-
ondary database. To retrieve data from IPFS, the transaction hash is accessed
from secondary database. Using that transaction hash, IPFS hash is retrieved
from the blockchain. However, if the secondary database fails, whole system will
fail. Similarly, [8] proposed an auditable protocol for transparent and tamper
proof transactions between trading entities, which include product owner, logis-
tics company and consumers. However, authors have not considered credibility of
merchants and trust between trading entities.

10 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

 Chapter 3

System Model and Proposed Methodology

11
Chapter 3

In this section, we describe our proposed solution. We have proposed a trace-

ability scheme in our proposed system for digitally tracking Agri-Food products
from origin to end consumers. Our system also introduces a trading and delivery
mechanism to allow secure trading between entities of Agri-Food supply chain.
A reputation system is also considered in our proposed system for the credibility
assurance of the entities in Agri-Food supply chain. Our proposed model follows
a layered architecture and is categorized into three layers. The first layer, i.e.,
data layer handles the interaction between entities involved in Agri-food supply
chains. These interactions involve the trading of products along with a proof of
an auditable delivery. The second layer is the blockchain layer that handles the
transactional data of the trading and delivery events. Also, it maintains the rep-
utation of the entities involved in the system. To improve storage capabilities,
the blockchain layer only keeps the hashes of data and the actual data is stored
on the third layer, i.e., storage layer. The blockchain layer enforces strict access
control strategies to prevent unauthorized reads and writes to the second layer.
The third layer is essentially the storage layer and is solely responsible for storing
the transactions and events data from blockchain. IPFS is used to increase the
storage capacity of blockchain. As, IPFS is a decentralized storage medium, it
leverages the proposed system with high throughput, low latency and scalability
[22].

The sub sections below elaborate how the proposed system achieves traceability.
It also explains the trade events between the Agri-Food supply chain entities and
the delivery mechanism that provides an auditable delivery of products. Lastly, it
defines how the reputation systems works and benefits the proposed system.

3.0.1 Traceability
Supply chain systems involve a large number of entities to carry out the entire pro-
cess of production and transportation from origin to the end consumers. Therefore,
it is cumbersome to track and trace the entire process. In order to achieve complete
traceability, we record the trading transaction from initiation, add the product’s
unique identity and lot number to each succeeding transaction and record the
hashes to maintain hash chain 1 . Lot is a group of products to be traded in a
warehouse and lot number is the unique identifier for these group of products.
For maintaining the hash chain, the transactional data is stored in IPFS. While,
the hashes to the data are recorded in ethereum blockchain, which overcomes
the limitation of IPFS. In order to write or access data from blockchain, access
1
Hash chain is the list of IPFS hashes recorded in blockchain

12 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 3

Storage Layer

IPFS LC
Logistic Company
Store Data
Read/Write Data
Utilizes

Blockchain Layer

Trading and Smart Contracts

Delivery Events Reputation System

Traceability Chain

LC LC LC LC
Data Layer

Farmer Processor Distributor Consumer

Retailer

Figure 3.1: Blockchain-based End to End Solution for Agri-Food Supply

Chain

control strategy is applied, which ensures the privacy and confidentiality in the
network. The access control strategies make sure that the transaction is carried
out by the authorized user. Only the registered users are allowed to perform the
specific transaction. Moreover, each function in the smart contract is allowed to
be executed by specific entities. No unauthorized entities are allowed to perform
certain task. Multiple supply chain entities that interact through smart contract
and part of data layer are as follows.

• Farmer: Farmer is the first entity in Agri-Food supply chain and is the first
one to invoke smart contract for trading. Farmers produce large amount
of crops and take the responsibility for assuring and monitoring the crop
growth details. He sells these crops to the processors.

• Processor: Processor buys the crops from farmers. He is responsible for

eliminating extra material from the crops and converting it into a finalized
product. Processor sells this finalized product to distributors.

• Distributor: Distributor maintains a warehouse by buying finalized prod-

ucts from processors and is responsible for selling it to the retailers.

13 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 3

• Retailer: Retailer is responsible for buying the finished traceable products

from distributors and selling it to customers in smaller quantities. Traceable
product refers to specific identifiers of the goods that allow tracking the
provenance data.

• Consumer: Consumer is an end user who buys and consumes the products
from retailers. However, a consumer verifies the credibility of a seller through
reputation system before buying.

The traceability process consists of three smart contracts, i.e., ProductandIdenti-

tyRegistration (PandIRegistration) contract, AddtoLot contract and AddTransac-
tion (AddTranx) contract. These contracts contain the addresses of each preceding
contract in order to maintain traceability chain of transactions. This helps the end-
consumers to know about the provenance of data. The PandIRegistration contract
is used to register the Agri-Food supply chain entities and the products produced
by each entity. However, the product registration process contains the address of
AddtoLot contract, in order to add the lot details of the product. Similarly, every
AddtoLot contract has the link address to the AddTrans contract. Additionally,
the supply chain entities are registered to the network and authorization is per-
formed whenever an event takes place. Only the specified entities are allowed to
perform certain transactions, for instance, only arbitrators have the authority to
remove an entity or malicious users from the system. Arbitrators are the off-chain
entities that are responsible for dispute handling.

All transactions of product registration, lot addition and updating transactions

are permanently stored on blockchain. The owner of the product is responsible to
deploy AddtoLot contract along with the PandIRegistration. AddtoLot contract
contains the details of products, lot information and transaction data. However,
the transactions are then updated to the blockchain in order to make sure that
product is successfully transferred to the next entity in the Agri-Food supply
chain. Moreover, the traceability scheme ensures that all transactions are success-
fully chained to blockchain. Hence, provides the complete process of tracing the
provenance of data.

3.0.2 Trading and Delivery

Before discussing the trading and delivery mechanism, lets consider a scenario
when end consumer has not yet initialized the transaction and wants to know the
market reputation of traders. For this purpose, reputation system is proposed
as described in Section 3.0.3. This system ensures that the product owners are

14 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 3

reliable enough to trust. Furthermore, for the delivery of product from one en-
tity to another, it is made sure that the whole process can be tracked and traced
by recording the information on blockchain and ensure auditable delivery to end
consumer. There are three main entities that are involved in the trading and de-
livery mechanism, i.e., product owner, logistic company, purchaser and arbitrator.
Where, product owner is the one who sells the product in supply chain; logistic
company is the courier service that transfers the goods; and purchaser, as name
depicts, is the one who wants to spend ethers to buy a product. In case of dis-
putes during transactions, arbitrators are responsible for off-chain settlement of
the disputes. However, Figure 3.2 represents the trading and delivery model.

Farmer Customer Distributor

8. Buy product 5. Sell finished
product to retailer 4. Buy products
1. Create Contract from retailer from processor
and sell crops to
processor

Proof of Delivery

7. Sell product to
customer 6. Buy finished 2. Buy crops 3. Sell products
product from from farmer to distributor
Retailer distributor
Processor Buy
Sell

Figure 3.2: Trading and Delivery Mechanism

In order to carry out the trading process, at first, the trading entities are regis-
tered to the smart contract,i.e., PandIRegistration and authenticated using their
ethereum addresses. After that, the transaction between product owner and pur-
chaser is initiated. In this regard, the purchaser selects the product and decides
a product code, i.e., P1 , which is used as unique identifier for pickup for logistic
company. The product code along with the product details are sent to the product
owner. Moreover, the product details, i.e., product owner, picture and price are
uploaded to IPFS and in return, IPFS hash is received. This hash helps in prov-
ing the authenticity of the product transferred. Furthermore, in order to confirm
the trading transaction, both parties in the transaction process submit a security
amount to the contract. Once the transaction is confirmed, the purchaser sub-
mits his payment amount to the product owner. In case of dispute, all funds are
transferred to the arbitrator’s account and distributed according to the off-chain
settlement of the dispute.

15 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 3

Furthermore, after the complete transaction between the product owner and pur-
chaser, the smart contract, i.e., POandL between product owner and logistic com-
pany is initiated. This contract manages the transportation of products from one
location to another. This process also collects the transportation security from
both parties, i.e. product owner and logistic company. This security amount is
collected from both parties to avoid the fear of manipulation. When a logistic
company collects the product for delivery, a pre-verification process is carried out.
In this process, the IPFS hash is used to access the product details and match
them with the actual product. This process makes sure that the logistic company
does not change the product during the delivery process. Consequently, ensures
the authenticity of the product.

3.0.3 Reputation System

A reputation system as shown in Figure 3.3 is introduced in blockchain layer of the
proposed model. The reputation system is responsible for assuring the credibility
of product owner and the asset delivered. It maintains the immutability and
integrity of the reviews registered in the system. In contrast to the traditional
reputation systems, the reviews are recorded in IPFS while their hashes are stored
in blockchain. In this way, immutability and integrity of reviews are maintained.
Reputation system is triggered after the trade events occur between the buyers
and sellers. The proposed system is responsible for invoking smart contracts to
provide service based reviews to the sellers. Once the transaction is completed, the
buyers register reviews which are also stored on IPFS. For the next transaction,
the buyers request reviews of sellers and perform transactions on the basis of those
reviews. The terms: sellers and buyers; product owners and purchasers are used
alternatively throughout the thesis.

Buyer

Smart Contract
Save Review
IPFS

Figure 3.3: Reputation System

16 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 3

The reputation system provides the trust values to the sellers in order to increase
the trust among trading entities. Whenever an entity buys a product from prod-
uct owner, after the complete trading and delivery process, the buyer decides the
ratings and reviews for the product owner. The trust values are the quality ratings
of the services provided by the sellers. Reputation of an entity is achieved through
the trust values stored in blockchain-based supply-chain. When trust value of a
seller is high, it means that the seller is highly trustworthy. Moreover, based on
the trust values of sellers, purchaser decides whether the product owner is reliable
or not. However, a seller may have some positive and negative ratings. Therefore,
the trust value in the proposed solution is calculated using Equation (3.1). Where,
P
Ratings denotes sum of all ratings of a seller and T otalRev is the total number
of reviews provided to the seller.

X
T rustV alue = Ratings/T otalRev (3.1)

The proposed system also ensures trust among the trading entities and make
sure that the buyer knows the reputation before purchasing the product from
seller. Whenever the entities sign a smart contract for trading, smart contract
for reputation is also triggered that provides the reviews of available data sellers.
Once the trading is successfully performed, the buyer also registers review for
the seller on the basis of the products received. The review registered by the
buyer is then stored against the seller profile in blockchain system. The smart
contract as shown in Figure 3.3 consists of four functions, i.e., RegisterReview(),
SearchRatings(), SearchReview and DoesReviewExist(). The four functions are
responsible for checking whether a review already exists,checking its content and
ratings and registering a review. The registering function takes metadata, ratings
of the asset and review details as input. These values are then used by the end
consumers to evaluate the quality of the product and reputation of the product
owner. Functions for searching a review and ratings, i.e., SearchReview() and
SearchRatings() are used to get the existing ratings and review details of a seller.

17 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

 Chapter 4

Simulation Results and Discussions

18
Chapter 4 4.1. SIMULATIONS RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

4.1 Simulations Results and Discussion

In this section, we discuss the simulation tools and performance results of the pro-
posed system. For the simulations purpose, an open-source platform for blockchain,
i.e., ethereum is used. The smart contracts are deployed over ethereum test net-
work ”Rinkeyby” [23]. Ethereum uses blockchain technology to develop decentral-
ized applications. It enables users to make smart contracts to make agreements
without any third party involvement. To assess the performance of blockchain-
based supply-chain network, we have used Remix Integrated Development Envi-
ronment (IDE) [24], Ganache [25] and Metamask [26]. Remix facilitates in writing,
executing and testing a smart contract. The language used for writing a smart
contract in Remix is Solidity. Whereas, Ganache provides the virtual accounts
with pre-defined amount of crypto-currency. After each transaction, the crypto-
currency is deducted from the account that performed transaction. Each account
in Ganache has its own private key and unique address. However, Metamask is an
extension in browser that acts as a bridge between Ganache and Remix IDE and
helps to make connection between them.

The specifications of the system are: intel core i5, 2.4 GHz processor, 8 GB RAM
and 500 GB storage. The performance parameters used to evaluate proposed
solution’s performance are as follows.

• Transaction and execution cost of smart contracts.

• Total amount of gas consumed for different input strings length in review
system.

• Mining time for different input strings length in reputation system.

• Deployment cost of smart contracts.

• Different number of products during registration in Agri-Food supply chain.

Table 4.1: Smart Contracts Cost Test (gasprice= 1 Gwei, 1 ether = 176.52
USD).

Deployment Cost in
Smart Contract USD
Gas Ether
PandIRegistration 1744760 0.0017448 $0.30708
AddtoLot 748260 0.0007483 $0.1317
AddTrans 700898 0.0007009 $0.12336
POandP 1683003 0.001683 $0.29621
POandL 1916209 0.0019162 $0.33725

19 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 4 4.1. SIMULATIONS RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In Figure 4.1, the gas consumption of reputation system smart contract is shown.
The reputation system consists of four functions, i.e., RegisterReview(), SearchRat-
ings(), SearchReview() and DoesReviewExist(). It is clearly visible from the graph
that RegisterReview() function consumes the maximum execution and transaction
gas as compared to the other functions. This is because the RegisterReview() func-
tion is responsible for saving the reviews against the user’s profile in blockchain and
perform more logically complex operations. Therefore, the transactional costs for
other functions are relatively less. The execution cost depends on computational
complexity of the transactions as they are carried out. While the transaction cost
is the combination of execution cost and the cost of sending smart contract code
to the ethereum blockchain.

120000
Transaction Cost

Execution Cost

100000
Gas Consumption (gas)

80000

60000

40000

20000

0
Register Search Search DoesReview

Review Ratings Reviews Exist

Figure 4.1: Gas Consumption of Reputation System

Figure 4.1 shows the gas consumption against the length of input string provided
for each review. By plotting the graph for different lengths of input strings, we
conclude that the relation between gas consumption and length of input string
is directly proportional, i.e., by increasing the length of an input string, the con-
sumption of the respective sting also increases. Therefore, we can say that longer
reviews will cost more as compared to the shorter ones.

In order to compare the mining time of reviews against the input string length, we
plotted a graph as shown in Figure 4.2. The input values provided in the reputation
system are processed as strings. We provide the input values of different lengths
and investigated its effect over the mining time for each string. It was observed
that the mining time for input was totally different and concluded that the different
lengths of input strings does not effect the mining time. However, the mining time
of transaction is dependent on the transactional conditions in a network. Miners

20 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 4 4.1. SIMULATIONS RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Gas Consumption (gas)

Review String Length

Figure 4.2: Gas Consumption against Input String Length

in a network are responsible for calculating a nonce that must be less than a target
value. Hence, if the target value has more difficulty level, mining will also increase
and vice versa.

Review String Length

Figure 4.3: Mining Time against Different Input Length

We evaluate the gas consumption for the deployment of each contract in our pro-
posed solution. The gas consumption is presented in Figure 4.4. However, actual
and USD cost of smart contracts is shown in the Table 4.1.

Moreover, we test different functions of the contracts with different random values.
It is seen during the experiments that by increasing the number of products during
the registration process, the RegisterProduct() function costs more as compared to
the other functions like AddtoLot() and AddTrans(). The Figure 4.5 below repre-
sents the increase in gas consumption of the RegisterProduct() function. However,
the gas consumption of other functions are not affected by the increase in number
of products.

21 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 4 4.2. SECURITY ANALYSES

2000000

Gas Consumption (gas)

1500000

1000000

500000

0
PandI AddtoLot AddTrans POandP POandLC
Registration

Figure 4.4: Gas Consumption of Smart Contracts

RegisterProduct()
AddLot()
AddTrans()
30000
Gas Consumption (gas)

25000

20000

15000

10000

5000

0
2 3 4 5 6
No. of Products

Figure 4.5: No. of Products vs Gas Consumption

4.2 Security Analyses

With the growing use of blockchain technology by different industries, various
types of attacks have emerged. Therefore, this section provides the vulnerability,
robustness and security analyses of the proposed solution and briefs how it is
resilient enough against different attacks.

4.2.1 Vulnerability and Robustness

The advancements in blockchain technology have made smart contracts an essen-
tial component of blockchain-based transactions. The solution proposed in this
thesis also uses smart contracts for transactional activities. Smart contract is a
piece of executable code that is responsible to facilitate digital transactions and

22 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 4 4.2. SECURITY ANALYSES

provide security in terms of authenticity, credibility and immutability. Once a

smart contract becomes the part of blockchain, it is executed as it is, whenever
triggered. However, the security of the smart contract totally depends on the code
written for it. If smart contract code is vulnerable, it seriously affects the security
of blockchain [27].

As smart contracts belong to an emerging technology; therefore, it still has some

security gaps. During ethereum’s initial development, Decentralized Autonomous
Organization (DAO) hack was one of the biggest hacking incident and caused the
loss of 3.6 million ethers that are equivalent to $70 million. DAO was respon-
sible for decentralized financial transactions via smart contracts [28]. Similarly,
many other vulnerabilities in smart contracts like re-entrancy bugs, time depen-
dency, concurrency bugs and callstack attacks are introduced in [28]. These vul-
nerabilities cause significant losses to blockchain-based systems. The well-known
vulnerabilities are defined as follows.

• Call Stack Attack: This attack is also known as call depth attack. It states
that if a call depth is equal to 1024 frames, the calling function will fail and
only run if the depth is 1023 frames. It also states that if a call or send
function is used to call another contract, the call depth increases by one. So,
if a call function calls itself for 1023 times and makes the call stack limit
1024, the next instruction fails.

• Time Dependency Attack: This attack is miner centric attack, in which

a miner manipulates the conditions of timestamp to favour miner. While
mining a transaction, miner set the timestamp of the transaction. In general,
a timestamp is time of miner’s physical machine. Using block timestamp,
the miner trigger a condition, where he sets timestamp as a specific value
that favours the miner.

• Concurrency Bug: It is also a miner side bug and comes under the umbrella of
transaction ordering dependency. It arises when two functions are executed
at the same time. This problem often comes up when a data structure or
database is updated.

• Re-entrancy Vulnerability: This vulnerability refers to a well known DAO

attack described earlier. It makes use of path conditions in order to check for
re-entrany conditions. In ethereum, when a contracts call another contract,
the current transaction waits for the call to finish. This issue can lead to a
situation when the transaction makes use of intermediate state of the caller.

23 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 4 4.2. SECURITY ANALYSES

Table 4.2: Comparison of Proposed Solution with Existing Techniques

Soybean Efficient
Proof of De- Our Solu-
Features Traceability Product
livery [18] tion
[6] Tracking [7]
Traceability 3 3 3 3
Accountability 7 7 3 3
Credibility 7 7 7 3
Authenticity
7 7 7 3
of Product
Automated
7 7 3 3
Payments
Delivery
7 7 3 3
Mechanism

Therefore, there is a need to analyze smart contract codes in order to make the
system robust against aforementioned attacks. Oyente is an open source security
analyzer of ethereum smart contracts proposed by authors in [28]. It analyzes the
smart contract on the basis of symbolic execution paths; where, each path has a
certain condition. The main responsibilities of oyente are as follows.

• Exploring all possible execution paths by using dummy values for variables.

• Recording contract’s behavior in each path.

• Summarizing the conditions for each path.

• Checking for violation of any property.

According to an analysis in [28], oyente has flagged 8,833 smart contracts out of
19,366 as vulnerable including the DAO smart contract. We tested our smart
contracts with oyente for any security and vulnerability attacks. The Figure 4.6
clearly shows that all contracts were robust against the aforementioned vulnera-
bility attacks and all reported results were false.

4.2.2 Security Features

This section presents the security features of the proposed solution and comparison
with related schemes as shown in Table 4.2.

4.2.2.1 Accountability

By implementing blockchain in the proposed scheme, complete decentralization

is achieved. It ensures the accountability of actions performed, if it is analyzed

24 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 4 4.2. SECURITY ANALYSES

(a)

(b)

Figure 4.6: Vulnerability Analysis of Smart Contracts

through logs. In this regard, the proposed solution allows regulators to become a
part of the system and analyze the logs in case of disputes. The regulators have
access to the blockchain data and can retrieve the required information in order
to provide proof for accountability. Additionally, malicious nodes cannot succeed
as they are protected with standard signature scheme and it is impossible for the
nodes to deny their actions.

4.2.2.2 Credibility

Credibility of the system is analyzed on the basis of level of trustworthiness among

the entities of the system. The proposed solution; therefore, contains reputation
system which is responsible for maintaining trust between the entities like, product

25 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 4 4.2. SECURITY ANALYSES

owner, purchaser, logistic company, etc. Moreover, leveraging from the inherent
properties of blockchain, the proposed solution is proved to be credible and secure.
Hackers cannot hack the proposed solution as long as they occupy more than 51%
of all nodes.

4.2.2.3 Auditability

The complete solution is auditable by any legitimate user of the system. It pro-
vides traceable smart contracts to track the transactions and events occurred.
Blockchain provides the benefits like transparency, immutability and traceability.
It ensures that the transactions in the blockchain are unforgeable.

4.2.2.4 Autonomy

All transactions and data exchanges in the proposed solution take place using
smart contract and prevent any kind of external interference. Hence ensures au-
tonomy and security in trustful environment. Moreover, consensus based verifi-
cation of blocks are also viewed as an autonomous property of blockchain-based
solutions.

4.2.2.5 Authenticity

All the events in the proposed solution are authenticated before performing the
transaction. The authentication process verifies the identity of both parties, i.e.,
product owner and purchaser. It ensures that certain functions are only performed
by specific entities in the system. Consequently, it also ensures the resistance to
man-in-the-middle attacks.

26 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

 Chapter 5

Conclusion and Future Work

27
Chapter 5 5.1. CONCLUSION

5.1 Conclusion
Using blockchain, supply chain industry has gained numerous benefits to grow and
move towards decentralization and achieve a trustless environment for all processes
in supply chain. However, despite the trustless nature of blockchain, it is hard to
fully maintain trust between the seller and buyer of the product. This is because
the entities do not perform their business in real and the buyer can doubt the
credibility of the seller. Moreover, supply chain involves multiple processes and
sub-processes that need to be carried out in a decentralized manner in order to
achieve traceability, accountability and security. In this thesis, we have proposed
an end to end solution for blockchain-based Agri-Food supply chain. We have
provided detailed aspects of proposed solution in terms of traceability, trading,
delivery and reputation. We have provided evaluation and analyses of smart con-
tracts in order to ensure that the proposed solution is efficent and robust. The
reputation system is proposed to maintain the credibility of the Agri-Food supply
chain entities and quality ratings of the products. Moreover, it also maintains
the immutability and integrity of the transactions as these transactions are based
on blockchain. Blockchain makes it impossible for the network entities to delete
or modify a transaction. We have also discussed the simulation results in detail.
The results show that our system requires certain amount of gas for deploying and
executing smart contracts.

5.2 Future work

To date, blockchain-based works still face challenges related to practical imple-
mentation of the solutions. In future, we will plan to integrate refund and re-
turn mechanisms in Agri-Food products trading. Similarly, the reputation system
stores reviews from end consumers which can be biased or fake. In this regard,
we will plan to integrate fake review detection system that will facilitate the rep-
utation system in detecting the false reviews from the end consumers. Moreover,
security analyses that will focus on attacks against reputation system will also be
considered.

28 Thesis by: Affaf Shahid

Chapter 6

References

29
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