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Blockchain for Aerospace and Defense: Opportunities and Open Research

Challenges
Article in Computers & Industrial Engineering · November 2020

DOI: 10.1016/j.cie.2020.106982
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Blockchain for Aerospace and Defense: Opportunities and Open

Research Challenges
Raja Wasim Ahmada, Haya Hasana, Ibrar Yaqooba,

Khaled Salaha, Raja Jayaramanb and Mohammed Omarb
a
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
b
Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering
Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Corresponding Author: raja.jayaraman@ku.ac.ae
Abstract
Blockchain is a promising and emerging technology that can have immense potential to provide
decentralized trust, data security and integrity, traceability, transparency, visibility, and
auditability across various areas in the aerospace and defense industries. In this survey, we study
how blockchain features, platforms, and architectures can be leveraged to reshape and
revolutionize modern aerospace and defense ecosystems and applications. We also provide
discussion into key blockchain complementary architectural technologies such as Oracles, IPFS,
and Filecoin. Furthermore, we discuss key opportunities and roles for blockchain in aerospace and
military applications. We investigate such opportunities by illustrating multiple use case scenarios
including battlefield operations management, border protection, swarm assistance for rescue
operations, logistics and supply chain management. Moreover, we compare the existing
blockchain platforms to analyze their suitability and applicability for aerospace and defense
applications. Finally, we identify and discuss several open issues and challenges for the widespread
adoption of blockchain in the aerospace and defense industry. These include latency, privacy,
regulation and law, large data traffic, smart contract security, and interoperability.
Keywords: Blockchain; Internet of Things; Smart Contracts; Supply Chain Management;
Aerospace Industry; Defense Industry
1. Introduction
Recent years have witnessed the rapid adoption of blockchain technology in multidisciplinary
industries which manages a large number of assets and distributed processes. The distinctive
characteristics and supremely beneficial features of blockchain have enabled organizations, such
as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) to perform military operations in a secure, transparent, economical, and
auditable manner. Specifically, DARPA is experimenting with blockchain to bring innovations in
the battlefield operation management sector concerning efficiency, robustness, and security
(Simerly and Keenaghan, 2019). NATO is employing blockchain to ensure secure military
procurement and traceable logistics supply services (Kar, 2019; Borland, 2018; Borlan 2018).
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Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) are formulating a blockchain-assisted strategy to provide resilient
communications in a profoundly contested environment (Chedrawi and Howayeck, 2018).
Besides, technology giants, such as IBM, Accenture, and Goldman Sachs are focusing on utilizing
blockchain technology to enable cost-effective, secure, and transparent business operations (Kar,
2019; Chedrawi and Howayeck, 2018; Zhang et al., 2019a; Remuss, 2010). Blockchain technology
is expected to generate a revenue of $19.9 billion by 2025 (Zhang et al., 2019a).
Aerospace and defense industries mostly depend on manual processes and paper-based
documents to keep and maintain their records to meet the compliance requirements. However,
manual documentation is prone to errors and difficult to manage. Besides, such storage poses high
risks of data duplication because various groups work together in parallel to process and update
the data records (Goudarzi, 2018; Miller, Schneider, and Brooks, 2017). Blockchain is an
appealing technology that provides single, synchronized, secure, and immutable records of the
data. Moreover, it is an economical option because it eliminates the need for delegation authority
needed to execute transactions. This is done by introducing the smart contracts concept (Chedrawi
and Howayeck, 2018; Lin and Liao, 2017; Gervais et al., 2016; Zhang and Lee, 2020; Gaži et al.,
2018; Stifter et al., 2019). The self-executing smart contracts serve as delegates to ensure trust
among participating entities. The smart contracts can be used to track ammunition supply in a
battlefield, verify aircraft components configuration, authenticate battlefield entities through
registration, reach a global decision support for swarm assisted rescue operations, certify crew
certificate, and audit battlefield operations. Specifically, in the supply chain management of
aircraft components, the transparency of records helps to increase trust among the stakeholders.
Consequently, this leads to operating a more reliable aircraft that complies with the defined
regulations and policies.
The blockchain-based registration process for aerospace and defense applications can help to
register every battle-field entity. This includes information from various sensors, drones, combat
equipment, vehicles, aircraft, smart weapons, and warfighters along with their role in a military
operation. Blockchain employs smart contracts for the registration process to ensure that only
registered members can read the data stored in the ledger. It also defines the access rights for every
battlefield warfighter as it depends on their position in the military hierarchy. For instance, in a
joint alliance operation, only commanders should be authorized to view and edit the surveillance
data for satisfying the situational demands. In such a scenario, the permissioned platforms (e.g.
Hyperledger Fabric (Cachin, 2016)) are appropriate options to create private channels for all
battlefield teams which ensures high privacy and security.
To date, several studies have investigated the applications of blockchain technology in different
applications such as healthcare (McGhin et al., 2019; Hölbl et al., 2018), supply chain management
(Sunny et al., 2020), artificial intelligence (AI) (Salah et al., 2019; Dinh and Thai, 2018;
Makridakis et al., 2018), and smart homes (Aung and Tantidham, 2017). Zheng et al. (2018)
discuss numerous challenges and opportunities of blockchain technology. Similarly, Li et al.
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(2020) examined security challenges influencing the performance of blockchain technology. To
the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to discuss in detail the potential
opportunities of blockchain technology for aerospace and defense industries. The main
contributions of this paper include:
 We conduct a state-of-the-art survey focused on leveraging blockchain technology in

aerospace and defense industries by highlighting its key features such as security, privacy,
trust, traceability, transparency, reliability, and auditability.
 We add an in-depth discussion on blockchain and its complementary technologies,
including IPFS, Filecoin, blockchain oracles, peer-to-peer networks, and smart contracts.
 We analyze several opportunities offered by blockchain for aerospace and defense

industries, including battlefield operations management, border protection, swarm
assistance for rescue operations, and logistics and supply chain management.
Additionally, we evaluate each opportunity by demonstrating a use case scenario.
 We investigate the suitability and applicability of using potential blockchain platforms

for aerospace and defense industries.
 We discuss several open research issues and challenges that impede the adoption of
blockchain technology to fully realize its potential in optimizing operations in the
aerospace and defense industries.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the background on blockchain
technology and supporting features including smart contracts, oracles, and decentralized storage.
Section 3 elaborates on various applications of blockchain in (a) battlefield operations
management, (b) logistics and supply chain management, (c) autonomous drone management, and
(d) border protection. Section 4 presents a detailed comparison of various blockchain platforms
for aerospace and defense applications and section 5 presents concluding remarks along with future
recommendations.
2. Background
In this section, we provide an overview of blockchain technology and its features, such as P2P
architecture and consensus algorithms. We highlight and define the role of smart contracts, oracles,
and distributed storage systems in blockchain technology.
2.1 Blockchain Technology
Blockchain technology is a decentralized distributed technology that provides a great breakthrough

in secure computing by storing, executing, and establishing trust in an untrusted open environment.
It follows a distributed P2P architecture to store and process transactions and data reliably and
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securely. Every digitally signed transaction remains shared among peer nodes to guarantee that the
same state of the digital ledger is available on every blockchain node. A set of nodes, called miners,
validates and stores transactions on the ledger to win a cryptocurrency-based monetary reward.
Consensus algorithms secure the blockchain and ensure that no malicious transactions can be
performed. The distributed storage feature of blockchain technology makes it practically
impossible to hack, modify, or remove the data from the ledger (Lin and Liao, 2017; Xina et al.,
2008).
Some blockchain platforms employ a Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm to append a new
block into the existing ledger by solving a cryptographic puzzle. Examples of such platforms
include Ethereum, NicalCoin (Longo et al., 2019), and Bitcoin. Miners validate transactions
compete amongst themselves by arbitrarily trying all possible combinations of strings to obtain
the desired results known as nonce. However, determining the value of the "nonce" to solve the
puzzle is very challenging. In the consensus process, PoW spends an immense amount of system
resources to find its value (Gervais et al., 2016; Zhang and Lee, 2020). On the other hand, in Proof-
of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol, every potential miner deposits its stake in the system to behave
honestly (Zhang and Lee, 2020; Ismail et al., 2019; Tedeschi et al., 2018). PoS uses fewer resources
during the consensus process compared to the PoW protocol (Zhang and Lee, 2020; Gaži et al.,
2018; Hasan et al., 2019).
Blockchain platforms use cryptographic hashes to secure transactions and data records. The
hash function generates a fixed-length message digest for an arbitrary length message. Each block
of a blockchain ledger contains the hash of the header of the previous block to ensure data
immutability. The blockchain platform uses asymmetric cryptography to ensure the high integrity
of data as well as accountability through digital signatures (Zheng et al., 2018; Sudhan and Nene,
2017). The blockchain platforms can be broadly categorized as permissionless, permissioned, or
consortium. Every user can read the transactions on a permissionless blockchain ledger.
Nevertheless, access rights to transact on a permissioned blockchain are limited to members of the
organization only. On the other hand, a consortium blockchain platform such as Quorum allows a
set of organizations to securely transact on the blockchain. Therefore, permissionless blockchain
platforms, being publically accessible, have zero access-control policy (Gervais et al., 2016; Zhang
and Lee, 2020; Gaži et al., 2018; Stifter et al., 2019).
2.2 Smart Contracts
A traditional business model highly depends on a centralized commissioned third-party service to

reconcile the conflicts among stakeholders. Nevertheless, a third-party centric reconciliation is
much slower and expensive. Alternatively, blockchain technology eliminates the requirement for
a third-party service for reconciliation. It allows trustless entities to transact with each other in a
much faster and economical way. The smart contract is a self-executing code that executes when
pre-defined conditions are met. It represents an agreement among stakeholders to transfer
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cryptocurrencies or assets of a certain value in an auditable fashion. The automation process
significantly boosts the performance of a business. Moreover, the immutable transaction records
can be used to resolve potential conflicts (if any) among business parties in a much faster way
(Raskin, 2017; Bartoletti and Pompianu, 2017; Lohmer and Lasch, 2020; Azzi et al., 2019; Hasan
et al., 2019). A blockchain platform uses consensus algorithms to enforce the correct execution of
the smart contract. The rules defined in a smart contract are executed when an event occurs. Each
smart contract on the Ethereum platform is referenced by a designated 160-bits address. The state
of the smart contract, such as virtual coins (ether) and private storage, update dynamically when a
user or a smart contract interacts with it (Bhargavan et al., 2016; Hasan et al., 2019). The outcomes
of a smart contract are deterministic as miners always operate on shared on-chain data. Although
nodes (miners) can be located at geographically different locations (being a consistent state of the
ledger at all peer nodes), the outcomes are always predictable. Blockchain technology ensures the
security and integrity of data based on asymmetric key cryptography, hash function, and attack-
resilient consensus protocols. The consensus protocol enforces that all miners should agree on a
common system state (Raskin, 2017; Bhargavan et al., 2016; Christidis and Devetsikiotis, 2016).
2.3 Blockchain Oracles

Smart contracts are envisioned to improve the performance of business applications as they
guarantee high data transparency among business stakeholders. However, their full potential
cannot be unlocked without using blockchain Oracles that act as middleware between blockchain
and the outside world (Matt-Zand, 2019). Oracles collect data from multiple sources to minimize
the chances of false information. The dependence on multiple data sources is probabilistically
safer. However, it incites additional monetary cost. Notably, Oracle miners may be vulnerable to
false information feed. Thus, fair incentive-based systems should be adopted to provide a reward
to the honest behaving oracles.
The state of an oracle changes when an external actor shares a new data update with it. The data
flow from oracles to a blockchain is cryptographically encrypted to ensure high data integrity.
Existing oracles can be classified into five categories, including software, hardware, inbound,
outbound, and consensus-based oracles. Software oracles use Web APIs, scrappers, and webhooks,
to extract, verify, and feed data to a blockchain. Hardware oracles directly interact with hardware
devices, such as RFID chips and IoT sensors to supply verified data points to the blockchain. An
inbound oracle provides external world data to a smart contract. For instance, automated Bitcoin
sell orders based on the market price is an example of inbound oracles. Outbound oracles transfer
information to the outside world from a smart contract. Consensus-based oracles feed data to a
blockchain, based on the consensus of all participant oracles (Matt-Zand, 2019; Sandor, 2019;
Mammadzada et al., 2020; Collins, 2018).
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2.4 Distributed Storage Systems
High-performance scientific applications generate a large volume of data. Distributed Storage

System (DSS) is suitable to persistently store large-sized data. A DSS aggregates the storage
capacity of various servers and self-coordinates to accommodate the storage and retrieval queries
of users. DSS-based servers are physically scattered in multiple locations. In DSS, servers are
organized in a hierarchical arrangement. Files are identified using an identifier that eliminates the
need to remember the names of each server where files are stored (Thanh et al., 2008). Two
prominent and popular distributed storage systems are discussed below:
 Interplanetary File System (IPFS): IPFS is a P2P file-sharing system that relies on
cryptographic hashes to identify and transfer files. The primary goal of IPFS is to
efficiently host large-sized files. It follows a distributed architecture based file storage,
such that every server can hold a chunk of total data to create resilient file storage and
sharing system. In IPFS, content-addresses are used to name a file. A distributed hash table
(DHT) helps peer nodes to search and request contents in IPFS which is based on the
content-address of a file (Steichen et al., 2018; Benet, 2014). In a battlefield environment,
large-sized videos and images can be stored on an IPFS server.
 Filecoin: Filecoin is a publicly provable and auditable decentralized network of storage

systems. Miners are used to providing storage capacity and bandwidth to their clients to
earn a reward. The network of miners replicates the contents on the peer storage servers to
ensure fault tolerance and reliability. The Filecoin system guarantees a high quality of
services. A blockchain network can verify such services using Filecoin’s Proofs-of-Storage
(PoS), Proof-of-Replication (PoRep), Proof-of-Space-Time (PoSt), and Proof-of-
Retrievability (PoR) features. For instance, PoRep-based service assures that data is
replicated on the physical servers to ensure the high-reliability of data (Protocol, 2017;
Vatsalyaet al., 2018).
Figure 1: Blockchain opportunities in aerospace and defense Industries
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3. Opportunities in Aerospace and Defense Industries
This section investigates potential opportunities for blockchain technology in the aerospace and
defense industries as shown in Figure 1. A detailed comparison of various blockchain platforms is
performed to analyze their suitability in the aerospace and defense industries.
3.1 Battlefield Operations Management
In the execution of military plans and battlefield operations, troops are required to coordinate and
communicate in a secure and trusted manner. Military troops receive the threat of eavesdropping,
Man-in-the-Middle (MITM), and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks (Xina et al., 2008). The IoT-
based battlefield frameworks sense, collect, and transfer battlefield data to the control server to
formulate military operation plans (Sudhan and Nene, 2017; Wrona, 2015). In a battlefield
network, sensors are attached to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), Combat Engineering Vehicles
(CEV), helmets, and weapons of the troops to generate huge data traffic (Cameron, 2018).
However, a compromised node in an IoT-based battlefield network can severely affect the
performance of a battlefield operation. For example, a compromised node can either modify the
data or reroute it to an adversary address for harmful purposes (Bao and Chen, 2012). Therefore,
detection and isolation of compromised nodes in an IoT-based battlefield network can enhance the
performance of a military operation (Banerjee et al., 2018; Nitti et al., 2013).
Cyber-attacks on military systems can significantly affect the progress of a military operation.
For instance, spoofing attacks on GPS-based missile systems can disable it. During a battle, an
effective cyber-attack on the navigation system of airspace results in disengagement of alliance
forces, ships, soldiers, and carriers. To ensure safeguard from cyber-attacks, NATO has proposed
some standards to assist military, civil, and private organizations to establish highly trusted cyber-
attack-resilient coordination (Remuss, 2010; Unal, 2019; Tuchs et al., 2010; Wrona and Jarosz,
2018; Hur and Kang, 2012; Titus, 2019).
To successfully execute a military operation, there is a critical need for a reliable communication
platform which improves the coordination among participating teams. An alliance nation’s mission
(also called joint operation) involves participants from different countries and organizations; such
as military troops, state institutions (e.g. police and rescue teams), fire brigade, medical and rescue
teams, cyber experts, and non-government organizations (NGO). All the above-mentioned
stakeholders have a policy-compliant role to play for the success of the mission. Command and
control (C&C) for military troops reflect the actions taken in compliance with the military plan. In
a technology-based battlefield environment, each military troop carries smart weapons that have
hundreds of sensors attached to them. In a traditional IoT-assisted battlefield environment, C&C
is prone to various cyber-attacks due to centralized storage and decision making. Consequently,
adversaries can alter data that can lead to the failure of a military mission.
The trusted blockchain technology can be used to secure C&C operations in a military operation.
Blockchain platforms used for battlefield operations assure that soldiers, aircraft, sensors attached
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to weapons or UAV, medical teams, and other non-military actors are registered securely. The
registration process assigns a unique digital identity to every battlefield entity. It further promises
that during military operations, data and transactions are only visible to those that have access
rights. During battlefield operations, the smart contract validates the entities and data. In this way,
data provenance is assured. Blockchain technology uses asymmetric key cryptography to verify
the authenticity and integrity of data. For instance, any change in data will be immediately
identified.
Digitally signed transactions and data can help authorities to identify troops’ movement and
location, thereby leading to devise an efficient military plan. The asymmetric cryptography ensures
that data has not been altered since its creation. All the participating entities, including military
divisions (artillery and infantry, air force, and cyber experts) follow the same military plan to meet
the specified objectives. The immutable records of commands and actions can be used to audit the
actions of alliance military troops. For instance, a leader can ask the artillery division to start an
operation on a battlefield area. Usually, one artillery division can serve many infantry teams on a
battlefield. Smart contracts can be used to record the location of artillery divisions and their status.
In response to the commander’s query, the smart contract can search the nearest available artillery
unit that is not currently engaged. The artillery division records the transaction on the blockchain
as proof of its action in response to the command. In such a way, transparency and traceability
features of blockchain technology ensure that all troops behave honestly and follow the same
military plan. Hence, higher authorities can use this recorded data to monitor the progress of the
mission.
During a battlefield operation, an in-field military store (registered on the blockchain)
distributes ammunition supplies among the alliance military teams. Using smart contracts and
sensors, available ammunition for each participating military team is automatically updated and
recorded on the ledger. The smart contract can monitor the ammunition of a battlefield team and
it automatically generates a request for the registered in-field store to immediately supply
additional ammunition. In response, the in-field store can supply the ammunition, and smart
contract updates the record of available ammunition of an in-field store on the blockchain ledger.
In a joint battlefield operation, the host and alien soldiers can trace their ammunition supply
through transparent transaction records. There is a possibility that in the in-field store only host
country ammunition is available. In such a case, the alien soldiers can use the blockchain ledger
to trace the history of supplied ammunition to confirm that the provided weapons are, (a) from a
valid manufacturer, (b) original, and (c) not erected before. The smart contract can also keep a
record of the amount of ammunition supplied to the troops and the total remaining balance. In such
a way, the total waiting time of soldiers for ammunition supply can be significantly minimized.
Figure 2 highlights the components of a blockchain-assisted battlefield operations management
framework. It also shows the flow of information among participants. In the presented framework,
the distributed system layer immutably stores and executes transactions on the blockchain network.
The smart contracts, implemented and executed on the blockchain platform, verify the access
rights of stakeholders to establish a military plan, audit resources and operations, track and trace
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battlefield ammunition supply, and monitor individual performance. The battlefield soldier can
use a blockchain ledger of immutable records to trace and track their ammunition supplies during
a battlefield operation. The performance monitoring and military plan establishment services are
only made accessible to high commanding officials and battlefield commanders. The bottom layer
in Figure 2, shows a set of battlefield entities interconnecting with each other using intermittent
wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and LoRa.
3.2 Logistics and Supply Chain Management
Logistics and supply chain management deals with planning, sourcing, manufacturing, and
inventory control to transform raw materials into finished products. It involves various
organizations, people, information, and activities in production and shipments of assets from
producers to customers (Azzi et al., 2019). The purpose of the supply chain is to create a trusted
collaborative environment among participating organizations by removing the communication
barriers among them. It also focuses on minimizing the product cost, securing product supply,
involving customers and suppliers in earlier product development and testing stages, improving
product utilization rate, and optimizing inventory systems (Olhager and Selldin, 2004; Helo and
Hao 2019; Hearn, 2016; Hasan et al., 2019).
The failure of a certain component of a military weapon due to firmware malfunctioning can
severely affect its primary functioning, and thus requires immediate replacement that incurs
additional cost (Madhwal and Panfilov, 2017; Rahayu et al., 2019). Therefore, better planning for
the procurement of military weapons can greatly minimize the total maintenance cost. For instance,
in the aerospace industry, the supply chain management process manages a large number of aircraft
components, dozens of parameters related to individual components, and hundreds of suppliers
located globally at different locations. Traditionally, in the aerospace industry, web-based
approaches are used for purchasing and selling purposes. However, these approaches are not fully
feasible due to a lack of traceability and transparency features (Madhwal and Panfilov, 2017;
Rahayu et al., 2019; Hackius and Petersen, 2017).
Blockchain-enabled supply chain to detect counterfeit components, locate the spare parts
requiring Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO), and establish the provenance of each part.
The supply chain management services for aircraft manufacturing can be classified into three
categories, which include Tier 1, Tier2, and Tier 3. Tier 1 services are related to the Original
Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) who develops aircraft parts, such as the engine and turbine. On
the other hand, Tier 2 services include assembling and testing of the aircraft based on Tier 1
supplied components. However, Tier 3 is more related to the production phase in which tiny
electronic components are manufactured (Madhwal and Panfilov, 2017). Blockchain helps to
stimulate stakeholders to register their services on the distributed ledger (Helo and Hao, 2019).
For instance, for Tier-1 stakeholders, the smart contract requires OEMs to register all
manufactured components along with their textual and graphical features on the blockchain. It can
use distributed storage systems (e.g. IPFS) to record large-sized files, such as videos and 3D
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images of components. Every stakeholder can trace the component purchase history using
blockchain. Similarly, the OEM can find the details and the reputation of the potential stakeholder.
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Figure 2: Blockchain-based architecture for battlefield operations management
Figure 3: Blockchain-based framework for aircraft engine supply chain management

Transparency and traceability of aerospace components can help to know the details of each stage
involved in the product development cycle. The traceability feature of blockchain technology
brings about transparency in the supply chain (via tracing and tracking) that can increase the trust
of the organizations participating in logistics and supply chain operations (Sunny et al., 2020). For
example, consider an aerospace industry-related case study, where Tier 1 (e.g. OEM) procures raw
material from Tier 3 to manufacture aircraft parts, such as engine and motor. After the
manufacturing process, OEM can update the procurement record on the ledger to indicate that a
component of a unique ID is manufactured with certain properties. It can add details of all
manufactured components along with the transaction records on the blockchain ledger. In the
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future, if a user attempts to modify (e.g. the serial number) and update the record on the blockchain,
this transaction will be immediately rejected by the miners. Similarly, during the overhaul process
at a maintenance service station, an engineer can use blockchain to estimate the time when service
will be required to a component based on its remaining life expectancy (Madhwal and Panfilov,
2017; Hackius and Petersen, 2017). Other potential advantages of blockchain technology for
supply chain management in the aerospace and defense sector include faster anomaly detection,
minimal possibilities of errors and frauds, low cost and delay, and immutable transaction records
for any conflict resolution.
In the aerospace industry, during the procurement process, various activities and
documentation details are recorded at the seller side, i.e. receipts for the buyer, proof of delivery,
payment invoices, and shipment credentials. Likewise, on the buyer side, all transaction details are
documented. Both parties can have a copy of each other documentation details shared via Email,
Fax, and courier services. In case of a dispute, one cannot easily reconcile as documents might
have been forged either intentionally or unintentionally. It is theoretically proven that 10% of the
freight invoices of organizations are problematic (Joseph, 2018). Therefore, blockchain technology
can be used to handle such types of issues as it offers reliability and transparency. Blockchain
helps to ensure that all purchase orders, transactions, and inventory receipts are digitally signed
and permanently recorded on the blockchain ledger. Also, it helps to authenticate and validate all
the stakeholders and transactions based on asymmetric cryptographic functions and hashing,
thereby enhancing the level among different parties involved in the system (Joseph, 2018; Rajkov,
2018).
Tracking and tracing of aerospace spare part components can help to reduce the total
maintenance cost of an aircraft. During supply chain management of a component, all movements,
changes, and ownership records are permanently stored in the blockchain ledger. Moreover, all
modifications that happened to the component are shared with the Aerospace Industries
Association (AIA) to monitor the airworthiness of an aircraft. OEM, MRO, and engineers are the
main stakeholders in the aerospace spare part ecosystem (Rajkov, 2018; Mocenco et al., 2015).
Figure 3 highlights the stakeholders from the OEM, inventory manager, shippers, and distributors
to the engineers. It also provides details on the access layer that enables the communication
between the stakeholders and the blockchain platform through the service layer. Blockchain
technology can be used to trace and track ownership and health conditions of an aerospace spare
part component. To summarize the potential use of blockchain technology in the aerospace
industry, a case study that highlights the main causes of engine failure is hereby presented. The
engineer uses the immutable blockchain ledger to trace transactions record to determine the cause
of a component failure. The provenance of the malfunction subpart of the engine can be traced to
find the reason for failure. In summary, the key applications of smart contract-based blockchain
technology in supply chain management of aerospace and military assets include (Rajkov, 2018;
Mire, 2018; Bogner et al., 2016; Madhwal and Panfilov, 2017; Chami Akmeemana, 2017; Zhang
et al., 2019b):
 Transaction settlement
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 Operations audit
 Secure shipment
 Secure and trustworthy collaboration in distributed manufacturing operations
 Incentives for high performing organizations in distributed manufacturing operations
 Prevention of compliance violation
 Identification of counterfeit parts
 Enforcement of tariff and trading policies
 Reliable additive manufacturing
3.3 Autonomous SWARM Drones Management
In modern counterinsurgency frameworks, drones are actively deployed in field operations for
surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeted attacks. Also, drones can play a vital role during rescue
operations in a catastrophic and natural disaster-affected area. For instance, drones deliver first aid
kit to victims before a healthcare team can reach the site.
A drone system includes embedded sensors, a GPS, stabilizers, and high definition cameras to
collect and disseminate data to present a detailed situational awareness at the ground-based
controller. The controller can command drones to change their behavior or physical position
(Henriksen and Ringsmose, 2015; Rana et al., 2019). As a response, it adjusts, collects, and
forwards the updated data to present the situation at the controller. In comparison, autonomous
drones can monitor their speed, motion, and resources to reconfigure and readjust independently
to reach their goal. The performance of drones is affected due to the presence of adversaries. For
instance, communication jamming by adversaries between a drone and controller can lead to drone
mission failure (Henriksen and Ringsmose, 2015; Rossiter, 2018). The adversarial nodes, in many
cases, insert regulators in embedded software of drones to hack the system (Krijnen and Dekker,
2014).
A swarm comprises multiple autonomous drones that work together to achieve a goal. Each
drone in a swarm can take off, land, and hover. Drones are organized in layers called clusters and
one of the drones is elected as a swarm leader to communicate to the ground-based controller.
Every drone can communicate with the swarm leader and drones of the same cluster to share
information (Zhu et al., 2017). Drone-to-drone communication helps drones to adjust their
behavior in response to real-time data. However, swarming is vulnerable to warfare attacks since
adversaries can intercept drone-to-drone communication to disrupt the data. Blockchain-assisted
swarm management can help to register each drone on the blockchain platform. The digitally
signed transactions, data provenance, and consensus mechanism can help to immediately identify
and nullify the drone-to-drone disrupted data. The smart contract-based blockchain solutions with
access control ensure that only registered nodes can access the ledger to participate in swarm
operations.
In the defense sector, a swarm can identify potential targets, environments, and hazards based
on real-time data. Each drone of a swarm equally participates to recognize a situation or target.
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Blockchain technology can be used to reach an auditable, transparent, and highly reliable global
decision-making of a swarm. For instance, blockchain-assisted secure voting can help a swarm of
untrusted drones to reach a global decision. In military defense systems, swarms can be used to (a)
detect enemies, (b) identify movement patterns, (c) recognize injured soldiers in the battlefield, (d)
identify obstacles, and (e) catalog victims in an emergency. Figure 4 presents a blockchain-assisted
methodology to identify intruders on a battlefield. The camera of the swarm leaders drone captures
a video to recognize the battlefield objects (Henriksen and Ringsmose, 2015; Zhu et al., 2017;
Ferrer, 2018). In response, the leader creates two addresses (smart contracts) on the blockchain to
invite swarm members to know their opinions. In response, each registered drone runs its object
recognition algorithm and estimates the result. It calculates the probability of the object to be an
intruder and writes the result on the blockchain. The smart contract stored on the blockchain
authenticates and verifies the data provenance. Finally, the smart contract combines the opinions
of all drones to publish the final result.
Catastrophes and natural disasters, such as earthquakes can damage the network infrastructure
which results in limiting the communication among rescue teams (Kong et al., 2016).
Consequently, it affects the performance of the rescue operation team. Typical systems ensure that
rescue teams, such as fire brigade, military, police, medical personnel, and social welfare
organization continuously communicate to share data. Infrastructure-less ad-hoc network
technologies are used to interconnect rescue teams in disaster-affected areas. Secure and auditable
swarm as-a-service can be used to remotely monitor rescue operations in a particular area. Swarm
services can include surveillance, sensing, and logistics for affected areas. The swarm can consist
of heterogeneous drones owned and managed by different partners.
The registration process for the blockchain-assisted swarm-as-a-service scheme registers every
owner and drone on the blockchain network. A user can trace swarm details, such as service type,
cost, and reputation on the ledger to hire it (via tracing of immutable records). In the next stage,
the user deposits cryptocurrency in a smart contract wallet to use swarm services. The certificate
of Service Level Agreement (SLA) is digitally signed and stored on the IPFS server. Hashes of the
certificate are registered on the blockchain. The swarm provides the selected services to the users
for a certain period. All digitally signed transactions and data are immutably recorded on the
blockchain ledger for audit purposes. Once service has been provided, the smart contract transfers
the amount to the wallet of owners to settle the payment (auditable). In summary, blockchain
technology can be used to create a trusted system among untrusted service users.
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Figure 4: Blockchain-assisted global decision-making using a swarm to detect battlefield

intrusion
3.4 Border Protection
There exists a rapid increase in effective and sustainable ICT-based border protection solutions.
The IoT-based border protection uses unattended static and mobile devices equipped with sensors
and cameras to capture real-time data from the border. It transfers data using intermittent wireless
links to a central server for storage and processing (Felemban, 2013; Liang et al., 2017). However,
central data storage and decision-making are prone to a single point of failure. For instance,
consider a case where an unknown drone is approaching the border. The IoT network identifies
the drone and immediately informs a central control server (Bao and Chen, 2012; Tosh et al.,
2018). In response, the central control server can issue a command to activate smart weapons to
catch the drone. There could be a possibility that an adversary has hacked the central control server.
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Therefore, the weapon activation command is intercepted by the adversaries and as a result, the
weapon will not be activated to overtake the drone.
Globalization and a substantial increase in the world population cause people to travel to other
counties seeking better job opportunities and education (Patel et al., 2018; Prasanna Lal Das,
2019). A country might have a banned-policy for the citizens of their disputed nations to avoid any
security risk. However, one can still hide details to breach the security. For instance, imagine a
future system where a dual nationality holder can fly to a disputed country. Normally, authorities
have limited access to details of a potential traveler, such as travel history on all passports. Also,
there are chances that travel history is not available due to damaged or stolen of passports. To
handle such issues, blockchain technology helps to record passport details (at the time of its
creation) on a private blockchain platform through a registration process. Access rights to view
records should be given to the owner of the passport and registered immigration authorities only.
The blockchain-based smart contract uses asymmetric key cryptography to authenticate the
immigration authorities and the owner of the passport to view the record. The immutable nature of
blockchain records eliminates the chances of fake passports.
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Figure 5: Smart contract-based sequence diagram to rescue a border operation

Several countries use the assistance of military troops of alien nations to protect their borders.
The blockchain-based solution employs smart contracts to register every military soldier and IoT
network device on the blockchain platform. On identifying an unauthorized border-crossing
attempt (data analysis on edge node), the smart contract can automatically inform and share data
with the registered military teams recognized as the first line of defense and the second line of
defense teams. The first line of defense, in response, starts the operation and periodically writes
updates on the blockchain to record the progress of the operation as shown in Figure 5. The smart
contract verifies and validates the data. The military plan states the required actions, coordination,
and sequence of operations to meet the desired goal. The smart contract notifies the second line of
defense to participate in the mission when the timer expires. In parallel, it records the events,
activities, and results, and shares it with higher authorities for periodical analysis. The transparency
feature of blockchain enables legitimate team members to see the progress on the mission.
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Based on the opportunities discussed, we conclude that blockchain technology has immense
potential to successfully digitize the services and operations of the aerospace and defense
industries. The explored use cases and applications as summarized in Figure 6 can assist
participating organizations to perform their operations in a trusted, secure, transparent, reliable,
auditable, and verifiable way. The intrinsic features of blockchain technology can support to (a)
successfully establish the provenance of aircraft spare parts, (b) significantly minimize anomaly
detection time through traceability feature, (c) timely identify legitimate users and battlefield
entities, (d) automatically calculate and assign a reputation score to the drones, (e) accurately
assess the services delivered by drones that are used for surveillance missions during catastrophic
events, (f) continuously monitor progress on military missions engaged in the battlefield, (g)
successfully track and trace spare parts supply chain, and (h) highly secure the borders.
4. Comparison of Blockchain Platforms for Aerospace and Defense Applications
In this section, we analyze several credible blockchain platforms based on a set of parameters for
the potential uses cases identified for border protection, battlefield, SWARM, and supply chain
management (SCM) areas as seen in Table 1. The purpose is to examine which blockchain platform
is more suitable for aerospace and military applications.
Figure 6: Summary of use case scenarios in aerospace and defense for blockchain technology
Table 1 presents a brief comparison of existing blockchain platforms appropriate for aerospace
and defense industries. To meet the requirements of defense and aerospace applications, we select
several open-source platforms (e.g. Wood et al., 2014; Androulaki et al., 2018; Baliga et al., 2018;
Page 18 of 32
Passerat-Palmbach et al., 2019; Hearn, 2016; Bergman et al., 2020; Sikorski et al., 2017; Galiev et
al., 2018; Nassar et al., 2020) that support smart contracts to automate the business rules among
participating organizations. Parameters are identified for the comparison of selected blockchain
platforms. The identified parameters represent the most essential requirements of the defense and
aerospace industry for digitizing their services through blockchain technology. Thus, these
parameters help select an appropriate platform for implementing services of the defense and
aerospace industry. For instance, the throughput of a platform is one of the important criteria to
select a platform to implement control and command use case scenarios of the battlefield.
Alternatively, securing the swarm from internal and external attacks is one of the important
requirements for swarm-based rescue and social welfare operations. Permissioned blockchain
platforms are more secure and exhibit high throughput than permissionless platforms. The type
parameter, highlighted in Table 1, names the platforms that are highly proficient to secure and
preserve the privacy of user’s data through the implementation of registration and access control
services.
Blockchain platforms are generally categorized as private, public, and consortium. For instance,
Ethereum is a public platform that establishes trust among business entities based on smart
contracts (Wood et al., 2014). A Hyperledger fabric is a private permissioned platform that
facilitates creating private channels between organizations/personnel, thereby leading to a privacy-
preserving environment (Androulaki et al., 2018). Hyperledger Besu is a flexible private platform
that helps organization members to either communicate in public or private mode for secure and
auditable actions (Passerat-Palmbach et al., 2019). Further, it assures that a set of transactions are
visible to a subset of organizations; whereas, the rest of the ledger transactions are open for all
registered members. Moreover, Hyperledger Besu (Passerat-Palmbach et al., 2019) is a java based
open source project that executes on Ethereum and private networks. This platform is
recommended for use case scenarios when an organization has to share both public and private
data for its stakeholders. The consensus protocols verify and validate the transactions. Hyperledger
Fabric is a flexible platform as it facilitates the organizations to plug-in their consensus protocol
to verify and validate transaction proposals. The support for cryptocurrency, smart contracts, and
supported languages for each platform is also highlighted in Table 1.
Public blockchain platforms are open where anyone can join and read the data on the ledger.
Therefore, considering the sensitivity of a military plan and battlefield data, the public Ethereum
platform is not recommended for military operations. But, the Ethereum platform is suitable to
successfully implement track and trace services for the supply chain management of aerospace
spare parts. For ammunition supply in a battlefield, the Ethereum platform may not be preferred
as adversaries can access the public records to predict the military actions and planning. Private
blockchain platforms such as Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu, Corda, and Mulitchain are
suitable to automate ammunition supply chain services to preserve high security and privacy of
data. For swarm-assisted military operations such as identifying intruders at borders, private
networks are ideal as swarm-based global decision-making transactions (e.g. attack a target) are
highly sensitive. Exposing such transaction information publicly through public blockchain
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platforms can lead to failing the mission. Therefore, blockchain platforms such as, Hyperledger
Fabric, Corda, Hyperledger Besu, Hydrachain, and Mulitchain are more suitable for the
implementation of rescue operations on borders through auditable and verifiable operations of a
swarm. However, for social welfare services, as highlighted in Table 1, a swarm action can be
recorded on a public blockchain platform. The sensitivity of data for blockchain-assisted
immigration services requires storing and sharing data using a private permissioned platform.
Table 1: Comparison of Blockchain Platforms for Aerospace and Defense Application
5. Open Research Issues and Challenges
This section presents research issues and challenges that engender successful adoption of
blockchain technology in aerospace and defense applications.
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5.1 Latency
Public blockchain platforms store and execute transactions in a trustless open environment. The
distributed Bitcoin platform manages financial transactions (Crosby et al., 2016). The Bitcoin
network takes approximately ten minutes to process a block. Hence, on average every transaction
takes ten minutes to be confirmed on a Bitcoin network. On the other hand, private blockchain
platforms are faster and take less time to confirm transactions. Battlefield operations require a
minimum execution time for a transaction to meet the military objectives. For instance, a
commander triggers a request on a smart contract to activate smart weapons. The blockchain
miners in response verify and validate the transaction to activate the weapon. In this scenario,
extended time to mine the block (with weapons activation command) can lead to operation failure.
Similarly, in blockchain-based swarm networks, drones communicate and transfer data among
each other for control information and cooperation to reach a global decision (Ferrer, 2018; Zhu
et al., 2017). In this case, fast and reliable information is required to meet the desired goal. Private
blockchain platforms, such as Hyperledger Fabric are flexible and allow organizations to plug-in
fast and reliable consensus protocols. However, the trade-off between reliability and speed makes
the process more complex. To handle this trade-off, the trusted military teams that belong to the
same country should be allowed to communicate using side-chains. For swarm-based applications,
drones owned and managed by the same user should be allowed to communicate directly to
minimize delays.
5.2 Privacy
Decentralized consensus and cryptographic hash functions secure the transactions and data on a
blockchain platform. Data privacy confirms that the sensitive data stored on a blockchain ledger
should remain private (Joshi et al., 2018). Blockchain technology was originally devised for a
digital currency called Bitcoin, but it can be leveraged to manage battlefield operations, secure
automated and self-organizing swarm operations, protect borders, and strengthen traceable supply
chain management activities. On public blockchain platforms, the privacy of data cannot be
guaranteed as transactions, data, and addresses are publicly accessible on the ledger. Although
Bitcoin uses pseudo names for actors, still public transaction details lead to privacy threats. On the
other hand, a private blockchain platform operates in a more controlled environment and the access
privileges of each entity are pre-defined to ensure data privacy. For a military operation, private
blockchain platforms, such as Hyperledger Fabric are capable to establish secure channels among
entities for data and privacy assurance.
5.3 Regulation and Law
The hype about the success of distributed technologies has attracted defense organizations, such
as DARPA and LAF to deploy blockchain platforms to secure battlefield operations (Boddy,
2019). NATO has started working on blockchain technology for military logistics and procurement
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(Wrona and Jarosz, 2019). Blockchain technology is still in its evolving stage. The standards,
regularity frameworks, and laws related to its applicability are still in the premature stage (Sandner
and Schulden, 2019; Lohmer and Lasch, 2020). Therefore, blockchain technology needs ample
research to develop standards and regulations for the military field. However, standardization
bodies, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and few other
organizations have started working on it to propose architectures for blockchain integration,
interoperability, governance, and pricing models. Also, incorporating blockchain with existing
military networks requires a considerable amount of money, effort, and time.
5.4 Large Data Traffic
In a battlefield environment, military weapons are equipped with hundreds of sensors to collect
and transfer data to the blockchain platform. The analysis techniques, such as predictive analysis
(Druby, 2019; Dai and Vasarhelyi, 2017) employs blockchain ledger to analyze progress on the
military mission, estimate the total time the ammunition supply will reach a soldier, and calculate
the lifetime of a drone-based on its battery consumption rate. Predictive analysis techniques
accurately determine the event if the size of data is large. Considering the bandwidth of the
network, resource-constrained nature of military nodes, and complexity of consensus algorithms,
the decision about how much and which data should be recorded on the blockchain ledger is very
critical. One possible solution is to allow entities of the same organizations to communicate via a
side-chain channel. Later on, the collective results of these transactions should be added to the
main blockchain to minimize military troops waiting time for better performance.
5.5 Smart Contract Security
A smart contract of a decentralized application encapsulates the core part of business logic. It
automates and handles the exchange of cryptocurrencies and valuable assets in a transparent and
auditable way. Despite such advantages, the presence of program bugs can prevent a smart contract
to function properly that may lead to huge losses and disruptions. For instance, a vulnerable
Ethereum smart contract was hacked that resulted in a loss of 3.6 million ethers in 2016 (Salah et
al., 2019; Destefanis et al., 2018). To overcome these challenges, several static and dynamic
analysis-based tools, such as ContractLarva, Erays, FSolidM, EtherTrust, KEVM, and Osiris have
emerged to identify and secure smart contracts against vulnerabilities (Di Angelo and Salzer,
2019). However, most of the developed tools follow a single-objective problem to safeguard smart
contracts against one type of bugs. The poorly designed smart contacts can affect the adaptability
of blockchain technology in the aerospace and defense industries. Sustainability costs, poor
economic behavior, external barriers (e.g. unclear governance, legal entities, and environment),
and scalability of deployed blockchain platforms can severely affect its adaptability of the
organizations (Lohmer and Lasch, 2020; Biswas and Gupta, 2019).
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5.6 Blockchain Platforms Deployment Cost
The cost of designing and deploying a blockchain-based smart contract to automate battlefield
operations depends on several factors including smart contract functionality, complexity, and type
of platform. The cost of deploying and executing smart contracts serves as a protection mechanism
against resources abusing, particularly for those smart contracts that consume many system
resources during their execution. The Ethereum platform charges gas as an execution cost to the
transaction sender to operate (Longo et al., 2019). Ethereum calculates the price for executing an
EVM operation such as addition or subtraction based on the product of gas price and gas units
consumed during the execution of that particular operation. However, calculating the gas cost
requires a deep understanding of EVM internals, accurate estimation of resources that are
consumed during EVM operations, and market price trends for using system resources such as
CPU and storage unit. An inaccurate estimate of gas cost can create an opportunity for hackers to
successfully launch DDoS attacks using underpriced operations (e.g. EXTCODESIZE) to slow
down the transaction execution speed. Further, it can lead to an inefficient disk space usage by the
deployed smart contracts and extended synchronization time for assuring a consistent and unified
view of ledger among participating organizations (Salah et al., 2019; Di Angelo and Salzer, 2019;
Chen et al., 2017).
5.7 Energy Efficiency and Throughput
Many IoT devices deployed on the battlefield are often incapable to run applications demanding
substantial computational, power, and storage budget to successfully execute defense operations.
The IoT-assisted and blockchain-centered battlefield operations require that miners should be
capable to handle the large data generated by the battlefield participants. To meet the resource
constraint nature of IoT devices, the consensus algorithms are desired to be resource-efficient.
Many consensus algorithms such as Proof-of-stack and mini-blockchain stores only recent
blockchain transactions to optimize the energy consumption (Drubby, 2019; Chen et al., 2017;
Hasan et al., 2019; Salah et al., 2020; Ferrag et al., 2018). However, more research is needed to
propose energy-efficient consensus algorithms that should be highly proficient to validate a
transaction to meet the low latency and high throughput requirements of military-based
applications. The throughput of public platforms such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is very limited as
they can execute only a few transactions per second. However, the private blockchain platforms,
such as Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu, and Quorum can execute several hundreds of
transactions per second as can be seen in Table 1.
5.8 Interoperability
Blockchain-enabled aerospace and defense systems are expected to propose technology

solutions to fix challenges, such as defense data-interoperability, privacy, security, and integrity.
Interoperability as well as intermediaries’ independent systems are essential for smooth
information sharing among multiple blockchain platforms. It desires that cross-platform shared
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information should be read and well understood by the entities (Salah et al., 2019; Rabah, 2017).
For instance, currently, the entities of a Bitcoin platform cannot share information with the
Hyperledger platform. The difference in supported languages, consensus protocols, and level of
protection in the smart contracts make it challenging to propose generalized interoperability
supported solutions. Open protocols, such as Atomic swap, provide data interoperability feature to
exchange cryptocurrency among Bitcoin and Ethereum platforms. Similarly, Multi-chain, an
interoperability supported platform, requires to plug a platform to use cross-platform
communication service, such as cryptocurrency sharing (Rabah, 2017; Jagati, 2018). Considering
the aerospace and defense industry, the interoperability solution should have privacy-preserving,
secure, and lower transaction cost features.
5.9 Scalability
The number of transactions on an Ethereum platform has increased from 3000 (October 2015)
to more than one million (January 2018) (Kansal, 2018). This rapid rise in transaction-rate has
affected (a) transaction fee, (b) block difficulty level, (c) energy consumption rate, and (d) total
waiting time of a transaction to be confirmed. It is estimated that the total energy used to mine
transactions on the blockchain is equivalent to the total energy consumption of Switzerland. Also,
increasing transaction-rate inflates block size that as a result requires blockchain nodes to be more
resource-rich. Otherwise, the platform will be slower, unsustainable, and expensive. Using fewer
bytes to store blocks of a ledger while assuring high integrity and security is a challenge that needs
additional research to surge the performance of blockchain technology. The consensus algorithms,
such as PoW, consume significant system resources and energy to confirm a block (Kansal, 2018;
Malavolta et al., 2019). Therefore, resource-efficient, lightweight, and cyber-attack resilient
algorithms should be used for private platforms.
6. Concluding Remarks and Future Recommendations
In this study, we mainly focused on the adoption of blockchain technology for aerospace and
defense industries by extensively discussing its unprecedented benefits. We provided an insightful
discussion on blockchain and its complementary architectural technologies. We presented
prominent use case scenarios to explore and investigate the potential opportunities offered by
blockchain technology in the aerospace and defense industries. Moreover, we compared multiple
blockchain platforms to find their suitability in aerospace and defense applications. Furthermore,
we discussed several open research issues and challenges that hinder the successful
implementation of blockchain in the aerospace and defense industries. Our key concluding remarks
along with future recommendations are summarized below:
 Maintaining battlefield data using blockchain platforms can help ensure more trusted,
secure, and credible data. However, it is very challenging to ensure fast processing,
execution, and storage of such data.
Page 24 of 32
 Autonomous swarm is an integral part of a modern warfare system as it protects borders

and participates in targeted surveillance operations. However, the presence of malicious
drones in a swarm can severely affect its performance. Such a presence can be eliminated
using smart contract-based registration on decentralized blockchain systems.
 Private blockchain platforms ensure high privacy through private channels and access
control policies compared to public platforms that have a zero-access control policy. Thus,
permissioned blockchain networks are more suitable for aerospace and military
applications, such as battlefield operations management, border protection, and
autonomous swarm operations.
 Supply chain management of aerospace components using blockchain technology can help
trace and track record of ownership details, with a trusted history and provenance of
components throughout the life cycle.
 Considering the role of entities involved and the privacy of data, public blockchain
platforms are suitable to implement supply chain management of aerospace components.
However, private blockchain platforms must be preferred for ammunition supply chain
management.
 The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws protect data about the
organizations participating in the supply chain logistics of spare part components of an
aircraft. Employing a public blockchain platform to digitize spare part components supply
chain operations face challenges to preserve the privacy of organizations’ data and
transactions. Hence, compliance with GDPR laws for employing public blockchain
platforms for securing the supply chain operations of spare part components is challenging.
This limitation can significantly affect the adaptability of blockchain technology in the
aerospace industry.
 Blockchain technology has shown immense potential to secure the services and operations
of the defense and aerospace industries. However, aerospace and defense industries face
several challenges related to blockchain adaptability and deployment cost. For instance,
lack of standards and premature governance rules, high cost of integrating with the legacy
systems, and inherited complexity of distributed technologies are few factors that may
affect the successful adoption of blockchain technology for defense and aerospace
industries.
 Proposing future blockchain-based architectures for aerospace and defense by identifying

system components, participants, participant’s roles, and deployment alternatives requires
further research. Our future research will extend the current work to propose and
implement Hyperledger Fabric-based architecture to present a proof of concept for the
identified opportunities in the defense and aerospace industry.
Page 25 of 32
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Blockchain for Aerospace and Defense: Opportunities and Open Research

Article in Computers & Industrial Engineering · November 2020

Haya Hasan Khaled Salah

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Establishment of Mobile Cloud Computing Lab View project

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Blockchain for Aerospace and Defense: Opportunities and Open

Raja Wasim Ahmada, Haya Hasana, Ibrar Yaqooba,

 We conduct a state-of-the-art survey focused on leveraging blockchain technology in

 We analyze several opportunities offered by blockchain for aerospace and defense

 We investigate the suitability and applicability of using potential blockchain platforms

2.1 Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology is a decentralized distributed technology that provides a great breakthrough

2.2 Smart Contracts

A traditional business model highly depends on a centralized commissioned third-party service to

2.3 Blockchain Oracles

High-performance scientific applications generate a large volume of data. Distributed Storage

 Filecoin: Filecoin is a publicly provable and auditable decentralized network of storage

Figure 1: Blockchain opportunities in aerospace and defense Industries

3.1 Battlefield Operations Management

3.2 Logistics and Supply Chain Management

Figure 3: Blockchain-based framework for aircraft engine supply chain management

3.3 Autonomous SWARM Drones Management

Figure 4: Blockchain-assisted global decision-making using a swarm to detect battlefield

3.4 Border Protection

Figure 5: Smart contract-based sequence diagram to rescue a border operation

4. Comparison of Blockchain Platforms for Aerospace and Defense Applications

Table 1: Comparison of Blockchain Platforms for Aerospace and Defense Application

5. Open Research Issues and Challenges

5.3 Regulation and Law

5.4 Large Data Traffic

5.5 Smart Contract Security

5.7 Energy Efficiency and Throughput

Blockchain-enabled aerospace and defense systems are expected to propose technology

6. Concluding Remarks and Future Recommendations

 Autonomous swarm is an integral part of a modern warfare system as it protects borders

 Proposing future blockchain-based architectures for aerospace and defense by identifying

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