TradeChain: Decoupling Traceability and Identity inBlockchain enabled Supply Chains
This addresses privacy concerns for participants in supply chains by enabling traceability without revealing identities, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain and cryptographic techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of privacy in blockchain-enabled supply chains by proposing TradeChain, a framework that decouples traceability and identity using decentralized identities and separate ledgers, with a proof-of-concept implementation showing minimal overheads in execution time, latency, and throughput.
In this work, we propose a privacy-preservation framework, TradeChain, which decouples the trade events of participants using decentralised identities. TradeChain adopts the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) principles and makes the following novel contributions: a) it incorporates two separate ledgers: a public permissioned blockchain for maintaining identities and the permissioned blockchain for recording trade flows, b) it uses Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) on traders' private credentials to prove multiple identities on trade ledger and c) allows data owners to define dynamic access rules for verifying traceability information from the trade ledger using access tokens and Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). A proof of concept implementation of TradeChain is presented on Hyperledger Indy and Fabric and an extensive evaluation of execution time, latency and throughput reveals minimal overheads.