Designing Secure Lightweight Blockchain-Enabled RFID-Based Authentication Protocol for Supply Chains in 5G Mobile Edge Computing Environment

Secure real-time data about goods in transit in supply chains needs bandwidth having capacity that is not fulfilled with the current infrastructure. Hence, 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) in mobile edge computing is intended to substantially increase this capacity. To deal with this issue, in this article, we design a new efficient lightweight blockchain-enabled radio frequency identification (RFID)-based authentication protocol for supply chains in 5G mobile edge computing environment, called lightweight blockchain-enabled RFID-based authentication protocol (LBRAPS). LBRAPS is based on bitwise exclusive-or (XOR), one-way cryptographic hash and bitwise rotation operations only. LBRAPS is shown to be secure against various attacks. Moreover, the simulation-based formal security verification using the broadly-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool assures that LBRAPS is secure. Finally, it is shown that LBRAPS has better trade-off among its security and functionality features, communication and computation costs as compared to those for existing protocols.