Data concealing of supply chain transactions using the Distributed Trust Backbone

Secure and accurate transactions are vital to any large-scale business system in order to guarantee the reliability of the system to stakeholders in both the public and private sectors. In supply chain systems, however, a variety of information security shortcomings is currently occurring in several processes, for example, related to data confidentiality. The Data Pipeline principle has been proposed to improve the security and quality of supply chain information systems. In a first elaboration, the Distributed Trust Backbone (DTB) model was designed. The DTB consists of a set of core components and protocols having the aim to enable secure information exchange. Next, a prototype has been implemented using computer systems available in three countries spread over the world. In order to test the system, we performed a case study in which data confidentiality appeared to be a fundamental requirement. In this paper, we describe our case study and argue that supply chain transactions can successfully be concealed using the DTB model. This concerns one of the fundamental requirement of secure information exchange along the international supply chain. © 2014 Infonomics Society