Trustworthy data is the fuel for ensuring transparent traceability, precise decision-making, and cogent coordination in the Supply Chain (SC) space. However, the disparate data silos act as a trade barrier in orchestrating the provenance of the product lifecycle; starting from the raw materials to end products available for customers. Besides product traceability, the legacy SCs face several other problems including data validation, data accessibility, security, and privacy issues. In this regard, Blockchain – an advanced Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) works well to address these challenges by linking fragmented and siloed SC events in an immutable audit trail. However, the underlying challenges with blockchain such as scalability, inability to access off-line data, vulnerability to quantum attacks, and high transaction fees necessitate a new solution to overcome the inefficiencies of the current blockchain design. In this regard, IOTA (the third generation of DLT) leverages a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based data structure in contrast to linear data structure of blockchain to address such challenges and facilitate a scalable, quantum-resistant, and miner-free solution for the Internet of Things (IoT). After realizing the crucial requirement of traceability and considering the limitations of blockchain in SC, in this work, we propose a provenance-enabled framework for the Electronics Supply Chain (ESC) through a permissioned IOTA ledger. To that end, we construct a transparent product ledger based on trade event details along with time-stamped SC processes to identify operational disruptions or counterfeiting issues. We further exploit the Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) protocol provided by IOTA that allows the SC players to procure distributed information while keeping confidential trade flows, ensuring restrictions on data retrieval, and facilitating the integration of fine-grained or coarse-grained data accessibility. Our experimental results show that the time required to construct secure provenance data aggregated from multiple SC entities takes 3 s (on average) for a local node and 4 s for a remote node, which is justifiable. Furthermore, we perform experiments on Raspberry Pi 3B to verify that the estimated energy consumption at resource-constrained devices is tolerable while implementing the proposed scheme.

可信赖的数据是确保供应链（SC）空间中透明的可追溯性，精确的决策制定和切实协调的动力。但是，不同的数据孤岛在协调产品生命周期的出处时成为贸易壁垒。从原材料到最终产品供客户使用。除了产品可追溯性之外，旧式SC还面临其他几个问题，包括数据验证，数据可访问性，安全性和隐私问题。在这方面，区块链–一种先进的分布式账本技术（DLT）通过在不可变的审计跟踪中链接零散的孤立的SC事件，很好地应对了这些挑战。但是，区块链的潜在挑战（例如可伸缩性，无法访问离线数据，易受量子攻击的影响以及高昂的交易费用）需要一种新的解决方案来克服当前区块链设计的低效率。对此，IOTA（第三代DLT）与基于区块链的线性数据结构相比，利用了基于有向无环图（DAG）的数据结构来应对此类挑战并为物联网提供可扩展，抗量子和无矿工的解决方案（IoT）。在意识到可追溯性的关键要求并考虑了SC中区块链的局限性之后，在这项工作中，我们通过许可的IOTA分类帐为电子供应链（ESC）提出了一种基于来源的框架。为此，我们基于贸易事件详细信息以及带有时间戳的SC流程来构建透明的产品分类帐，以识别操作中断或伪造问题。我们进一步利用屏蔽身份验证消息IOTA提供的（MAM）协议，允许SC参与者获取分散的信息，同时保持机密的贸易流，确保对数据检索的限制，并促进细粒度或粗粒度数据可访问性的集成。我们的实验结果表明，构建从多个SC实体聚合的安全出处数据所需的时间对于本地节点而言平均为3 s，对于远程节点而言平均为4 s，这是合理的。此外，我们在Raspberry Pi 3B上进行了实验，以验证在实施提出的方案时，资源受限设备的估计能耗是可以忍受的。