A circular supply chain is a system that keeps products, parts, and raw materials in use for as long as possible through reuse, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling. Instead of treating an item as waste at end of life, the chain tries to recover value from it and feed that value back into production.
In cyber security, circular supply chains matter because they depend on trustworthy data. Every handoff, inspection, and recovery step needs accurate records to prove where an asset came from, who handled it, and what happened to it. If those records are altered, lost, or spoofed, attackers can hide theft, falsify compliance reports, insert counterfeit parts, or make stolen equipment harder to trace. Defenders protect these flows with strong asset tracking, access control, audit logs, signed records, and tamper-evident systems that preserve provenance across the lifecycle.