DECOUPLES: a decentralized, unlinkable and privacy-preserving traceability system for the supply chain

Abstract

Traceability is an increasingly important aspect of the supply chain with several highlights throughout the last few decades. Parties, such as consumers and government agencies, have shown an increase in demand for information regarding their products and materials. Although there exist numerous frameworks for traceability solutions, these frameworks fail to address the concerns with regards to privacy-sensitive information, certificate verifiability, and auditability. Our contribution is in two-fold: a traceability system DECOUPLES and the product-auditable PASTA protocol. DECOUPLES is the first decentralized, unlinkable and privacy-preserving traceability system for the supply chain, to the best of our knowledge. The system incorporates cryptographic techniques to address the aforementioned concerns. Our second contribution is the PASTA protocol, which allows unique tracking keys per product, per actor. The protocol also anonymizes the receiver of a transaction. Our complexity analysis and proof-of-concept implementation results show that DECOUPLES is a feasible traceability system for the supply chain.