Hyperledger Fabric: Evaluating Endorsement Policy Strategies in Supply Chains

Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain solution, in which network participation is controlled by predefined rules. This makes it an attractive platform for enterprise settings. In Fabric, endorsement policies are used to specify the peers that must confirm a transaction before it can be considered as valid and appended to the ledger. This work examines various implications of Fabric's endorsement policy component, for which different endorsement policy strategies (and subsequent trade-offs) are evaluated by modeling two real-world supply chain case studies. This work discusses how vulnerable endorsement policies can lead to admitting inauthentic data on the ledger. To address this issue, several approaches are proposed to balance integrity with limited disclosure of confidential information, with or without hosting a network peer directly. Furthermore, the concept of multi-tenancy in blockchain networks is introduced as a way of reducing the technological barrier in technology adoption.