Ensuring sustainable sourcing of crude materials and production of goods is a pressing problem in consideration of the growing world population and rapid climate change. Supply-chain traceability systems based on distributed ledgers can help to enforce sustainability policies like production limits. We propose two mutually independent distributed-ledger-based protocols that enable public verifiability of policy compliance. They are designed for different supply-chain scenarios and use different privacy-enhancing technologies in order to protect confidential supply-chain data: secret sharing and homomorphic encryption. The protocols can be added to existing supply-chain traceability solutions with minor effort. They ensure confidentiality of transaction details and offer public verifiability of producers' compliance, enabling institutions and even end consumers to evaluate sustainability of supply chains. Through extensive theoretical and empirical evaluation, we show that both protocols perform verification for lifelike supply-chain scenarios in perfectly practical time.

2022 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS)