Medical supply chain communication networks engender critical information and data. Notably in the COVID era, inner personal and private information is being shared between healthcare providers regarding the medical supply chain. In recent years, multiple cyber-attacks have targeted medical supply chain communication networks due to their lack of security measures. In the era where cyber-attacks are cheaper and easier due to the computational power and various algorithms available for malicious uses, security, and data privacy requires intensive and higher measures. On the other hand, Information Hiding Techniques (IHT) compromise various advanced methods to hide sensitive information from being disclosed to malicious nodes. Moreover, with the support of Blockchain, IHT can bring higher security and the required privacy levels. In this paper, we propose the implementation of Blockchain and smart contract with the information hiding technique to enhance the security and privacy of data communication in critical systems, such as smart healthcare supply chain communication networks. Results show the feasibility of the framework using Hyperledger smart contract along with the desired security level.

Intertwining smart manufacturing and the Internet of Things (IoT) is known as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). IIoT improves product quality and reliability and requires intelligent connection, real-time data processing, collaborative monitoring, and automatic information processing. Recently, it has been increasingly deployed; however, multi-party collaborative information processing is often required in heterogeneous IIoT. The security and efficiency requirements of each party interacting with other partners have become a significant challenge in information security. This paper proposes an automated smart manufacturing framework based on Digital Twin (DT) and Blockchain. The data used in the DT are all from the cluster generated after blockchain authentication. The processed data in the DT will only be accessed and visualized in the cloud when necessary. Therefore, all the data transmitted in the process are result reports, avoiding the frequent transmission of sensitive data. Simulation results show that the proposed authentication mode takes less time than the standard protocol. In addition, our DT framework for a smart factory deploys the PDQN DRL model, proving to have higher accuracy, stability, and reliability.