| Project Reference: | ITP/026/21LP |
| Project Title: | Secure & Identity Unlinked Provenance Traced Blockchain |
| Hosting Institution: | LSCM R&D Centre (LSCM) |
| Abstract: | Traceability plays an important role on today's supply chain. Traceability not only helps companies have quicker response and identify points of failure in case of incidents, but also brings confidence to customers in purchasing the products. Traditionally, these traceability systems were closed systems running in centralized databases solely owned by the companies themselves and faced difficulties in data exchange with multiple parties, which was an obstacle in constructing a trustable and complete traceability record from raw materials to end-product. Recent development of traceability systems attempts to solve such problem with the emerging blockchain technology. It allows distributed information sharing and maintains traceability records for different parties along the same supply chain easily. However, these blockchain-based systems are still closed for privacy issue: companies need to maintain different blockchain-based systems in order to do business with different partners without leaking any trade secrets. This places heavy burden on operational cost and restricts the use of blockchain-based traceability systems. To address this problem, we propose Secure & identity Unlinked Provenance Traced Blockchain (SUPERB). SUPERB is a blockchain-based traceability system which implements a protocol making use of cryptographic primitives such as encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to protect secrecy. Zero-knowledge proofs can be applied to allow the blockchain-based traceability system to verify the encrypted traceability records in a distributed, decentralized and trustless manner without revealing the actual traceability records. This would enable different companies from different supply chains to share the same traceability system for their products, while still keeping their trade secrets confidential. |
| Project Coordinator: | Dr Chung-Dak SHUM |
| Approved Funding Amount: | HK$ 2.7 M |
| Project Period: | 21 June 2021 - 20 Sep 2022 |
