Forward Traceability for Product Authenticity Using Ethereum Smart Contracts

One of the most sought-after properties in supply chains is traceability. Traceability involves knowing where a product has been and what happened to it, helping to establish product authenticity. Current traceability solutions focus on generating and storing data but do not verify whether the stored data is correct. In this short paper, we address such a limitation. We do so by introducing forward traceability: an extension of standard traceability definitions with correctness as an additional feature, making forward traceability well-suited for real-time counterfeit detection. We also provide an implementation of forward traceability in a decentralised system in the Solidity language, which we tested on the Ethereum platform. Our proof-of-concept is available on GitHub.