Biblio

In the management of transport and logistics, which includes the delivery, movement and collection of goods through roads, ports and airports, participate, in general, many different actors. The most critical aspects of supply chain systems include time, space and interdependencies. Besides, there are several security challenges that can be caused both by unintentional and intentional errors. With all this in mind, this work proposes the combination of technologies such as RFID, GPS, WiFi Direct and LTE/3G to automate product authentication and merchandise tracking, reducing the negative effects caused either by mismanagement or attacks against the process of the supply chain. In this way, this work proposes a ubiquitous management scheme for the monitoring through the cloud of freight and logistics systems, including demand management, customization and automatic replenishment of out-of-stock goods. The proposal implies an improvement in the efficiency of the systems, which can be quantified in a reduction of time and cost in the inventory and distribution processes, and in a greater facility for the detection of counterfeit versions of branded articles. In addition, it can be used to create safer and more efficient schemes that help companies and organizations to improve the quality of the service and the traceability of the transported goods.

Trust Management (TM) systems for authentication are vital to the security of online interactions, which are ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Various systems, like the Web PKI (X.509) and PGP's Web of Trust are used to manage trust in this setting. In recent years, blockchain technology has been introduced as a panacea to our security problems, including that of authentication, without sufficient reasoning, as to its merits.In this work, we investigate the merits of using open distributed ledgers (ODLs), such as the one implemented by blockchain technology, for securing TM systems for authentication. We formally model such systems, and explore how blockchain can help mitigate attacks against them. After formal argumentation, we conclude that in the context of Trust Management for authentication, blockchain technology, and ODLs in general, can offer considerable advantages compared to previous approaches. Our analysis is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to formally model and argue about the security of TM systems for authentication, based on blockchain technology. To achieve this result, we first provide an abstract model for TM systems for authentication. Then, we show how this model can be conceptually encoded in a blockchain, by expressing it as a series of state transitions. As a next step, we examine five prevalent attacks on TM systems, and provide evidence that blockchain-based solutions can be beneficial to the security of such systems, by mitigating, or completely negating such attacks.