## 7 Research Gaps and Future Opportunities
### Recommendations  
Based on the identified research gaps as above, it is desired to equip current blockchain-based solutions with the information of actual business processes (i.e., computational components) and communication infrastructure (i.e., communication components) that enables various stakeholders to interact using blockchain-based supply chain environment. In the following, we discuss various ways in which business process level information of interacting stakeholders can be helpful to protect end-to-end operations of BC-SCM systems. Firstly, information of the business process of interacting stakeholders strengthens blockchain enabled protection of supply chain management systems by making sure that interaction (including smart contracts) among stakeholders is not only compliant with the rules encoded in smart contracts but also compliant with their corresponding business processes. This will ensure that the interactions are deeply transparent and being compliant with their business processes. This also helps in detecting those threats that have cascading effects to their interacting business. Secondly, such information will help developing self-aware and cognitive protection system for supply chain stakeholders by providing practical business context of the interactions (e.g., smart contract based), protecting information against critical infrastructure-targeting attacks as well as variant of known attacks. Furthermore, the information may also be used to ensure that smart contract-based interactions among stakeholders are consistent with business process of the stakeholders. Further, it is also possible to detect potential errors/inconsistencies in the stakeholders business processes that provide end-to-end protection of the information. Thirdly, business process-level information also support evolving business policies/agreements without changing actual implementation of the blockchain based interactions. This is critically important because the business process is continuously evolving due to the changing business requirements or their compliant with emerging directives and policies, e.g., GDPR. Fourthly, the business process information could also help in understanding the actual cause of a threat or attack. The system will not only be aware of the interactions (e.g., which are typically interface for transactions only) but also aware of the end-to-end details of the corresponding business process. In fact, current blockchain based systems only records interactions (e.g., data) which can only help to see any compromise to the information but fails to detect compliance/integrity of the actual contents of the information. Fifthly, such information may be adequate not only to recover compromised operations but may also be helpful to automatically mitigate impact of the identified threats/attacks, due to the system's ability to identify exact asset/component that has been compromised. Thus, the information will help in detecting incidents as well as their impacts. Finally, with such information, blockchain based systems would be more transparent with known potential reasons of a threat/attack incident. Since current interactions--including transaction rules--among stakeholders are based on smart contract, and they have limited information about the actual business process of the stakeholders, thus they are like blackboxes. Therefore, with the transparent business process to partners, this information can establish more trust among interacting stakeholders. Consequently, business process information of supply chain stakeholders will strengthen protection that is provided by BC-SCM systems through providing end-to-end details of the interactions.