Supply Chain Traceability Platform Using Homomorphic Encryption
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing supply chain traceability systems fail to ensure the confidentiality of transaction details while providing public verifiability, leading to privacy concerns for supply chain actors and making it difficult for consumers to verify product claims without compromising sensitive information.
Innovation Solution
A supply chain traceability platform that encrypts data before storage, using fully homomorphic encryption and proxy re-encryption to enable verification of product claims without decrypting confidential data, ensuring confidentiality and integrity of transaction details.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If supply chain data is stored in plaintext in a distributed ledger, then transparency and verifiability are improved, but confidentiality and privacy of transaction details deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies parameter changes by transforming the state of data from plaintext to encrypted form, and implementing homomorphic encryption to enable computations on encrypted data. This allows the system to maintain verifiability while improving confidentiality, as verifiers can prove properties about data without seeing the actual plaintext values.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces proof intermediaries that act as mediators between the stored encrypted data and the verification process. These proofs enable verifiers to confirm claims about supply chain data without directly accessing or decrypting the underlying confidential information, thus resolving the contradiction between verifiability and confidentiality.
2Loss of information
If supply chain data is encrypted before storage, then confidentiality of transaction details is improved, but public verifiability of product claims deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses homomorphic encryption to change the operational parameters of encrypted data, allowing mathematical operations to be performed on ciphertexts that yield encrypted results corresponding to the operations on plaintexts. This enables verification of product claims without decryption, resolving the contradiction between confidentiality and verifiability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces the traditional mechanical approach of decrypting data for verification with a cryptographic substitution using homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs. This allows verification to occur on encrypted data directly, eliminating the need to compromise confidentiality while maintaining verifiability.
3Reliability
If transaction details are made transparent for verification, then consumer trust is improved, but competitive advantages of supply chain actors are compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces cryptographic proofs as intermediaries that enable consumer trust by providing verifiable evidence of supply chain claims without exposing confidential transaction details. These proofs allow consumers to verify authenticity and quality claims while protecting trade secrets, thus resolving the contradiction between building trust and maintaining competitive advantage.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts only the necessary verification information from the encrypted supply chain data through cryptographic proofs, allowing consumers to verify claims without accessing the full transaction details. This extraction process provides sufficient evidence for consumer trust while leaving confidential information protected.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods, systems, and computer-readable storage media for receiving an index and a random number from a verifier, receiving, from a shared data storage, encrypted supply chain data (SCD) of a supply chain actor (SCA), re-encrypting the encrypted SCD to provide re-encrypted SCD using a public encryption key of a decryption party, executing homomorphic operations on the re-encrypted SCD to provide an encrypted blinded result using second random numbers, receiving an encrypted modified blinded result, generating an encrypted blinded verification result using a verification function, the encrypted blinded result, the encrypted modified blinded result, and the random number, and sending the encrypted blinded verification result for decryption to provide a blinded verification result to the verifier, the verifier determining a verification result based on the blinded verification result and the random number, and comparing the verification result to a product claim.