A Robust Spatio-Temporal Verification Protocol for Blockchain

Massive Spatio-temporal data is increasingly collected in a variety of domains including supply chain. The authenticity as well as the security of such data is usually a concern due to the requirement of trust in centralised systems. Blockchain technology has come to the forth recently and offers ways for trustless and reliable storage and processing of data. However, current blockchain proposals either do not support spatial data or make simplifying assumptions such as ‘trusted’ servers to process spatio-temporal data. We presume that the notion of ‘trust’ in a blockchain is too strong an assumption and propose a robust spatio-temporal verification protocol for the blockchain. In this work, we present a novel practical proof-of-location protocol on top of a permissioned blockchain. The protocol is instrumented by the implementation of an access control model and utilises a set of verification rules to create and verify spatio-temporal data points. We also propose a threat-to-validity model to evaluate the robustness of the verification protocol. The applicability and practicality of the protocol is demonstrated by the implementation of a supply chain case study as a proof-of-concept.