Blockchain Technology in Overcoming Security Threats for Smart Manufacturing System - A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Blockchain is a new emerging technology that is mainly used to add security layers to many applications. Studies showed that businesses and manufacturing industries suffer from cyber-attacks, especially after the emergence of Industry 4.0 and IoT devices connected to the cloud for data sharing purposes, these interactions between IoT devices and the information involved in the transactions between companies and customers produce a massive amount of data daily. This phenomenon becomes an easy target for attackers due to the security limitations, data corruption and compromised reliability of the traditional manufacturing systems during data transferring. Many have focused on the methods to address these security limitations of the manufacturing businesses. This paper shed the light on the major smart manufacturing sectors that can potentially benefit from blockchain technologies, including cloud manufacturing, collaborative manufacturing, digital twin manufacturing, robonomics based smart manufacturing and the supply chain industry. The blockchain can enhance the security by creating a decentralized environment for the data to be stored, which will make the data stored immutable for improved security. These immutable data are nearly impossible to manipulate, replace, or falsify the data stored on the blockchain secured network.