ChainGuard: Verified Data Intake for a Track & Trace Blockchain

Maintaining a reliable record of goods movement is essential to supply chain management systems. Ensuring this reliability becomes more challenging as supply chains expand and many stakeholders must collaborate to provide data. Blockchain technology enables a multi-owner system that ensures data integrity through its immutable, transparent, and decentralized features. However, in the supply chain, data is collected from sensor devices at business sites or during transport along the supply chain. This dependence on single-source data undermines the decentralization and security guarantees of blockchain systems. This work proposes ChainGuard, a system to verify data intake from single sources in blockchains using a decentralized verification process guided by stakeholder-defined rules. It detects errors to ensure compliance with quality criteria. A prototype focused on location sensors was developed and tested in a real-world traceability system monitoring for commercial fruit shipments. The prototype successfully identified three types of suspicious data patterns, achieving low performance impact compared to a system without data verification.