Logbook for all data in the foodchain using trusted execution and blockchains.
The Brown Marmorated Stink Bug Halyomorpha halys (HH) is an emerging pest of global importance for many agricultural crops. Field monitoring is crucial to obtain information on the actual presence and abundance of HH in order to organize timely and proper management actions, and also because chemical control has proved to be unsatisfactory. Driven by the quest of improving sustainability, the HALY.ID project proposes an autonomous field-monitoring system as well as an autonomous fruit-monitoring system to replace common human-based field monitoring of HH, and to detect the internally damaged fruits invisible to the naked eye. Different parties involved in this process have different interests, e.g., consumers want to have accurate information about the production process, while producers might be tempted to hide negative information to be able to increase the prices of the products. To provide a trustworthy source of that information, we developed a trusted logbook, offering immutable and consistent information storage based on a blockchain.
Traditional blockchains provide trust by using a distributed system able to tolerate arbitrary failures of a certain number of participants. For use in the HALY.ID project, the cost of a large distributed system is prohibitive to ease adoption by farmers and other stakeholders. Similarly, blockchain- as-a-service, as offered by Cloud Providers such as Amazon AWS, eliminates the cost of purchasing hardware, but still incurs a high cost for running the system and, furthermore, requires an internet connection not necessarily available on remote rural farms. Thus, our developed logbook establishes trust, not by distribution, but instead by using a Trusted Execution Environment as the source of trust. In the form of, e.g., Intel SGX and Arm TrustZone, Trusted Execution Environments are available in off-the-shelf consumer-grade CPUs. Using this technology, the whole blockchain system can run on one single small edge device, greatly reducing the cost of the hardware and the power consumed by the system.
Our logbook is able to log monitoring data produced on the orchards, during transport, and during further processing in a way that prevents manipulation of data and that ensures that every party is able to see the same state. This logbook is based on a blockchain, which, traditionally, would require a large distributed system to run securely.
Instead of establishing trust by distribution, our system makes use of a Trusted Execution Environment to establish trust. Trusted Execution Environments are readily available on consumer-grade CPUs, making our system runnable on small edge devices.
The system needs further evaluation and testing.
