## 6 Industrial Efforts to Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Management: Tools
### Efforts against Communication Attacks
#### 6.1.3 Interoperability and Secure Information Exchanged  
To ensure interoperability among various cross-border systems and infrastructures in a secure way, industry experts devised block-chain based solutions to seamlessly interoperate digital trade among various cross-border parties. Such solutions enable traceable interactions among parties to establish confidence and trust among cross-border business partners. Since the cross-border communication requires dispute handling, therefore, some expertsemphasised on the developing of solutions that automatically resolve digital dispute that arises from cross-border companies through recording all interactions among parties in a blockchain. One of such replicable solutions is developed by IBM Blockchain [80] that transforms dispute resolution between multiple parties of supply chain. In IBM solution, the blockchain network serves as a single source of ground truth that is visible to only permissioned parties. The agreements and business rules are automatically executed by smart contracts. In principle, stakeholders send processed data to the blockchain directly from their recording-systems, and grant visibility to selected/permitted participants. By not granting visibility to anyone else, the privacy is preserved in a multi-participant environment. This also avoids errors that come from manual data entry processes. Next, business logic of the solution identifies discrepancies between data elements and documents to determine the root cause of any dispute. For example, in a supply chain process, a dispute can occur due to a measurement-unit error, a delivery location error, or the quantity delivered? Considering an example of the settlement of roaming charged by a telecom sector, everyone needs to agree on consumed data, text and voice, and rates to be charged. Here, all comparisons are performed on a near real-time basis as new data becomes available. As a result, disputes are identified and handled as they occur, dramatically reducing dispute resolution cycle time. IBM's platform supports automated dispute resolution rules synthesize the discrepancy data to reach consensus. The consensus decision, along with the applied rules, is made visible to all required participants. Consequently, final consensus decisions are then sent back to the system of record. All data, discrepancies and resulting decisions are stored within the blockchain distributed ledger to create a comprehensive and immutable audit history. The main problem of the IBM's platform is its inability to resolve disputes where cross-chains and cross-border interactions are allowed. Also, it cannot handle those disputes that are raised due to the processes which are not programmed using smart contracts. Like IBM, Google also launched an exciting platform [77] for verifiable data audit using blockchain. Every time, the platform adds an entry to a special digital ledger, once there is any interaction with data. That entry records the fact that a particular piece of data has been used, and also the corresponding reason, e.g., \"the blood test data was checked against the NHS national algorithm to detect possible acute kidney injury\". The ledger and its entries share some of the properties of blockchain, like the idea behind Bitcoin and other projects. Like a blockchain, the ledger is append-only, so once a record of data use is added, it can't later be erased. Also, the ledger make it possible for third parties to verify the tampered entries. The platform differs blockchain in couple of ways. Firstly, the blockchain is decentralised, whose ledger verification is determined by consensus amongst the participants. To prevent abuse, most blockchains require participants to repeatedly carry out complex calculations, with huge associated costs (according to some statistics, the total energy usage of blockchain participants could be as much as the power consumption of Cyprus). Unlike blockchain, verifiable data audit does not follow blockchain, and avoids the waste of energy-resources.