A Traceable Firearm Management System Based on Blockchain and IoT Technology

In some liberal democracies, governments allow people to legally own guns to protect their lives and property. However, gun crime has been increasing in recent years. Taking the United States, for example, a report pointed out that Americans are 10 times more likely to be shot than citizens of other countries. Murder using guns in the United States is 25 times more than that in the other 22 high-income countries. Most of these guns came from other cities. These illegally circulating guns are directly linked to deadly street violence. This means that effective firearm management can reduce deadly violence. In the past few years, Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology was often used to track the supply chain. However, in the traditional supply chain, only the participants of the supply chain can query information. Furthermore, only the participants can verify the correctness of the data. This result causes information to be not transparent. On the other hand, blockchain technology, with a unique combination of features such as distributed notes, decentralized structure, consensus algorithm, storage mechanism, asymmetric encryption, and smart contract, ensures network visibility, transparency, and security. Therefore, we combine blockchain and RFID technology to propose a traceable firearm management system based on blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The proposed method achieves several goals. First of all, the characteristic data through the blockchain can be publicly verified and the information will not be modified. The traceability of the data and the application of RFID can effectively manage the production chain. In addition, we used Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic (BAN logic) logic to prove mutual authentication, and the nonrepudiation and integrity method can also be achieved in our proposed scheme.