TradeChain: Decoupling Traceability and Identity inBlockchain enabled Supply Chains

TL;DR

TradeChain introduces a privacy-preserving blockchain framework for supply chains that decouples identities from trade events using decentralised identities, zero-knowledge proofs, and flexible access control, ensuring traceability and privacy.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework combining dual ledgers, ZKPs, and dynamic access rules for privacy-preserving supply chain traceability, implemented on Hyperledger platforms.

Findings

Minimal overheads in execution time, latency, and throughput

Effective decoupling of identities and trade data

Enhanced privacy with flexible access control mechanisms

Abstract

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.