RiceChain-Plus: an enhanced framework for blockchain-based rice supply chain systems-ensuring security, privacy, and efficiency.

The rice supply chain is a complex system that demands effective management to ensure reliability and efficiency, given the involvement of multiple stakeholders. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and tamper-resistant nature, offers a promising solution for improving transparency, traceability, and credibility in agricultural supply chains. However, existing blockchain systems face several technological challenges, including security vulnerabilities, privacy concerns, and performance limitations. To address these issues, this article presents RiceChain-Plus, an enhanced architecture that incorporates a private Ethereum blockchain, proof of authority (PoA) consensus mechanism, mutual authentication, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), a hybrid role-based access control (RBAC) and attribute-based access control (ABAC) system, and one-way hash functions. This approach enhances the rice supply chain's security, privacy, and efficiency by safeguarding sensitive data and ensuring confidentiality. Performance assessments show that RiceChain-Plus surpasses existing benchmark models, achieving the lowest average execution costs (44,634 gas), reduced energy consumption (9.38828E-05 J), higher throughput (0.071201 transactions/s), faster execution (44.5 ms), and quicker transaction times (14.045 s), while also improving scalability. A comprehensive security analysis further confirms the framework's resilience against various cyberattacks. These results highlight RiceChain-Plus as a secure, efficient, and effective solution for optimizing rice supply chain operations.