Cryptographic Provenance for Resilient Factory Operationsand Manufacturing Value Chains
Main article
Abstract
The escalating complexity of modern manufacturing ecosystems, combined with increasing threats from counterfeiting, tampering, and multi-tier supply chain disruptions, demands robust mechanisms for establishing and verifying the origin and transformation history of manufactured goods and production events. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for cryptographic provenance in factory operations and manufacturing value chains, addressing the critical need for tamper-evident, verifiable records across heterogeneous industrial networks. The proposed architecture integrates hash-linked Provenance Record Objects (PROs), asymmetric cryptographic signatures based on ECDSA P-256 and Dilithium post-quantum primitives, and a permissioned distributed ledger to create immutable provenance chains for manufacturing artifacts and production processes. A smart-contract-driven automation layer enforces quality standards, triggers compliance alerts, and orchestrates cross-organizational data sharing without exposing proprietary manufacturing intelligence. A detailed performance evaluation conducted across simulated multi-factory scenarios demonstrates that the proposed system achieves throughput of up to 1,240 transactions per second with sub-second finality under standard operational conditions, representing a 47.1% improvement over VeChain and a 212.3% improvement over Ethereum PoA baselines. Resilience analysis confirms that the system maintains data integrity and operational continuity even when up to 33% of participating nodes experience simultaneous failure. Experimental results confirm 100% falsification detection across 250 simulated attack scenarios and zero data loss under 80 network-partition events. The findings establish that cryptographic provenance mechanisms are both technically feasible and operationally viable for large-scale deployment in contemporary manufacturing environments, with substantial implications for product authenticity, regulatory compliance, and supply chain resilience.
