A blockchain-based crypto-anchor platform for interoperable product authentication

Abstract

Counterfeiting is a major problem in many industries, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damages every year. Digital twins further increase a product's value, making it critical to secure the link between the physical and digital world. An entire industry has sprung up to address this problem with a wide variety of product-authentication technologies, or crypto anchors, offering many different trade-offs between supported product surface, security level, price sensitivity, ease of use, etc. Each crypto-anchor vendor provides their own APIs for commissioning, verification and monitoring which makes it hard for application developers to support many of them. This paper introduces a platform that provides a generic model of an object secured by a crypto anchor, supporting any number of product authentication technologies by means of crypto-anchor plugins. Applications programmed against this generic model can immediately interoperate with any of the plugged-in crypto anchors. We present a blockchain architecture for the platform whose decentralization matches the highly differentiated industry structure. We've implemented the system on Hyperledger Fabric.