2023 9th International Conference on Web Research (ICWR) 365 979-8-3503-9969-1/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE A Blockchain-Based Approach for Data Storage in Drug Supply Chain Amirhosein Tahmasbzadeh* Shahid Beheshti University Tehran, Iran amirt3707@gmail.com Saeideh Kabirirad Birjand University of Technology Birjand, Iran kabiri@birjandut.ac.ir Abstract— Traceability and auditability are essential features in supply chain management and construction. However, from the customers' perspective, trust is the most critical aspect of these systems. Additionally, relying on third parties for trade in centralized systems is indispensable. Blockchain-based drug traceability provides a potential solution to create a platform for an immutable, trustworthy, accountable, and transparent system in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Furthermore, we present a model for storing pharmaceutical supply chain data using blockchain, which leverages the key advantages of blockchain and smart contracts. Our proposed solution is based on hyperledger Besu and is complete and cost-effective in terms of the privacy and confidentiality of the blockchain network. Additionally, our proposed model addresses the challenges of storing large data in the blockchain, which we intend to solve by using the IPFS storage system. In such a system, instead of storing big data, we store their abstracts in the blockchain to reduce the load pressure of the chain and realize efficient information queries. Keywords— Blockchain, Hyperledger Besu, IPFS, Smart Contract, Supply Chain I. INTRODUCTION automated networks that offer potential benefits and capabilities in the modern world. Currently, consumers are interested in ensuring the safety and health of the products they purchase. However, tracing the origin of data and maintaining its traceability throughout the supply chain network is challenging [1]. Traditional supply chains as seen in Fig.1, are centralized and dependent on trusted third parties for business, resulting in a lack of transparency, integrity, and auditability. Blockchain technology provides a decentralized structure in which data is verified through a distributed consensus process across a group of parties (devices/users connected to the network). Blockchain belongs to a wider category of distributed ledger technologies that can save transactions in an ordered manner. Transactions represent the results of operations that occur between network nodes. Each block, through a cryptographic protocol, maintains a reference to the previous block, creating the concept of blockchain as an immutable data structure. Unlike traditional web applications, the blockchain is not recorded on a centralized server; instead, it is distributed over network nodes, each of which has a copy of the entire blockchain. As a result, two main aspects of this technology include: (1) Decentralization of consensus. (2) Decentralization of distributed ledgers. Although blockchain provides immutability of data and records on the network, challenges such as the credibility of the entities involved, reliability, and product traceability still exist. Especially in cases such as the supply chain of perishable materials and pharmaceuticals, a reliable system is needed to ensure traceability, trust, and delivery mechanisms. Smart contracts can be used to increase reliability in the blockchain. In the supply chains of drugs, perishable materials, and agriculture, there must be careful monitoring during the transportation and distribution process, so using the Internet of Things helps to monitor the transportation conditions online and process the data that is intelligently received from the sensors and stored in the blockchain. To deploy blockchain, various platforms such as HyperLedger, Kaleido Blockchain Business Cloud, Salesforce Platform, IBM Blockchain Platform, and Azure Blockchain Workbench are available, where we will take advantage of Hyperledger over other platforms. Hyperledger is an open- source program [9] focused on developing a set of stable frameworks, tools, and libraries for enterprise-wide blockchain deployments. Hyperledger has a modular approach to hosting projects and hosts the development of blockchain projects, from the beginning of the project process to stable code. One of its main goals is to advance the project based on distributed ledger and smart contracts [10]. One of the challenges of blockchain-based systems is the large volume of generated data. This problem arises when the scale of the system becomes large, such as in IoT-based systems, where a lot of data is created over time, or the system data includes multimedia data.If all the data is stored in the blockchain, there will be a huge demand for storage space and bandwidth to synchronize the data with the network, and it may prevent many nodes from joining the network. Also, searching in such a database will be time-consuming. One of the proposed solutions in such a system is the use of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). In this paper, we propose a data storage model for a drug supply chain system based on blockchain, which uses the key advantages of blockchain and smart contracts. Also, we implement the model using hyperledger Besu. The proposed approach addresses the problems of storing large data in the blockchain by using the IPFS storage system. Instead of storing big data in the blockchain, their hashes are stored in the blockchain to reduce the load pressure of the chain and realize efficient information queries. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: in Sec.2, related works are given, and Sec.3 introduces Hyperledger Besu, a consensus algorithm. Sec.5 introduces IPFs and finally, Section six concludes the paper. II. RELATED WORKS So far, several blockchain-based platforms with different goals in the field of healthcare have been proposed, which try to create transparency, better services, and protect people's privacy by using blockchain facilities. In [2], the MedRec platform is introduced, which is a decentralized distributed ledger