A blockchain-based Product Ownership Management System for anti-counterfeits in the Post Supply Chain.

Table of Contents

• About
• Getting Started
• Deployment
• Limitations
• Future Scope
• Contributing
• Authors
• Acknowledgements

About

• In today’s world, how do you know if you are buying a genuine product?
• For more than a decade now, RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) technology has been quite effective in providing anti-counterfeits measures in the supply chain.
• We leverage the idea of Bitcoin’s blockchain that anyone can check the proof of possession of balance. Along with this, we plan to use QR codes.
• We plan to implement a proof-of-concept system employing a blockchain-based decentralized application which gives a customer the entire history of a product (eg - brand info, owner, etc).

Data Flow

Why blockchain?

• Unlike a normal database, Blockchain has a non-destructive (immutable) way to track data changes over time. This means that data is not editable rather, whenever updates are made, a new block is added to the “block-chain”. This helps track historical data (authenticity and owner data) of a product.
• Given the amount of data to be dealt with (large amount of products being developed), if you have to keep track of all of them, it is better to have a decentralized and distributed network of nodes so that no entity can tamper with the product data and we also obtain 100% up time.
• Transparent nature of the Blockchain helps avoid parallel trade.
• Using Blockchain, authenticity can be checked and ownership of a product can be transferred decades from now; even if the product is discontinued.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

What things you need to install the software and how to install them Installing NodeJs

$ sudo apt-get install nodejs

Installing Android Studio

Installing

A step by step series of examples that tell you how to get a development env running

Cloning the repo

$ git clone https://github.com/kylelobo/AuthentiFi.git

Installing the dependencies

$ cd AuthentiFi
$ npm install

Running the server

$ node server.js

Deployment

1. Instantiate your data directory

geth --datadir ./myDataDir init ./myGenesis.json

2. Start your Ethereum peer node.

• Networkid helps ensure the privacy of your network. You can use any number here (where we used “1114”), but other peers joining your network must use the same one.

geth --datadir ./myDataDir --networkid 1114 console 2>> myEth.log

• Output should look like this:

Welcome to the Geth JavaScript console!

instance: Geth/v1.7.3-stable-4bb3c89d/darwin-amd64/go1.8.3
coinbase: 0xae13d41d66af28380c7af6d825ab557eb271ffff
at block: 5 (Thu, 07 Dec 2017 17:08:48 PST)
datadir: /Users/test/my-eth-chain/myDataDir
modules: admin:1.0 clique:1.0 debug:1.0 eth:1.0 miner:1.0 net:1.0 personal:1.0 rpc:1.0 txpool:1.0 web3:1.0

>

This is the geth JavaScript console. Any command with the symbol > should be typed here.

3. Display your Ethereum logs

• Open another terminal window
• cd my-eth-chain
• Type tail -f myEth.log

4. Import/Create an Account

• If you allocated ETH in the Genesis file, import the corresponding account by dragging the UTC file into the myDataDir/keystoredirectory and skip to step 5.
• In the geth JavaScript console, create an account:

> personal.newAccount("<YOUR_PASSPHRASE>")

• Do not forget this passphrase! You will be typing this a lot, so for this test network you can keep it simple.

5. Set Default Account

• Check your default account, type

> eth.coinbase

• If this address is the same as the one from step 4, skip the rest of step 5.
• To set your default account, type

> miner.setEtherbase(web3.eth.accounts[0])

6. Start mining

• Check your balance with

> eth.getBalance(eth.coinbase)

• Run

> miner.start()

• Look at your other terminal window, you should see some mining action in the logs. Check your balance again and it should be higher.
• To end mining, type

> miner.stop()

Built With

Mobile App:

• Android Studio - Android app
• NodeJs - Server Environment
• MySQL - Database

Blockchain:

• Ethereum - Blockchain Network
• Solidity - Smart Contracts
• Ganache - Create private Ethereum blockchain to run tests

Website:

• HTML - Markup language for creating web pages
• CSS - Style Sheet Language
• JavaScript - Scripting Language for web pages
• Bootstrap - Templating

Limitations

• The user needs to have a QR code scanner in order to check the product information.
• Products that have already been manufactured prior to today cannot be tracked.
• We currently depend on the company to register with our services, without which, we cannot provide information about a brand to the user.

Future Scope

• To track every genuine product that is to be sold.
• Implement this idea in other fields.
• Virtual transactions
• Using tamper-proof tags
• Dynamic (read & write NFC tags)
• QR codes which have secure graphic
• Implement our own tokens which can be sold to users so that they can purchase ownership of a product using tokens which helps in insurance processing.

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/kylelobo/AuthentiFi/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/fooBar)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some fooBar')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/fooBar)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Authors

• Calden Rodrigues
  
• JohnAnand Abraham
  
• Kyle Lobo
  
• Pratik Nerurkar
  

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

Acknowledgements

How To: Create Your Own Private Ethereum Blockchain - Mercury Protocol