Security Analysis of a Blockchain Based Data Collection Method for Cross Company Information Sharing

Abstract

AbstractDigitization within medium-sized enterprises advanced in the last years. Collecting and analyzing data for optimizing internal production processes therefor is the current state of many companies. The next step of digitization is using this collected data not only for internal processes but for cross company business models along the value network. This step brings new requirements for how data is collected, stored and shared. In this paper those requirements are listed and explained. Afterwards, an implemented solution for data collection fulfilling the requirements is analyzed. The focus of the analysis lies on security issues within the data flow between data creation and cross-company usage. Therefore, the timespan between data creation on a sensor, processing the data within local IT-systems and reliably storing data within a blockchain is considered. A threat modeling approach considering attack vectors along the described data flow is used to quantitatively compare the proposed solution to regular industrial solutions. The analysis will highlight the differences of the compared solutions on different topics like data integrity and immutability. Lastly, an outlook on industrial usage of the analyzed solution is given.