T2L: A traceable and trustable consortium blockchain for logistics

Abstract

Traceability and trustiness are two critical issues in the logistics sector. Blockchain provides a potential way for logistics tracking systems due to its traits of tamper resistance. However, it is non-trivial to apply blockchain on logistics because of firstly, the binding relationship between virtue data and physical location cannot be guaranteed so that frauds may exist. Secondly, it is neither practical to upload complete data on the blockchain due to the limited storage resources nor convincing to trust the digest of the data. This paper proposes a traceable and trustable consortium blockchain for logistics T²L to provide an efficient solution to the mentioned problems. Specifically, the authenticated geocoding data from telecom operators’ base stations are adopted to ensure the location credibility of the data before being uploaded to the blockchain for the purpose of reliable traceability of the logistics. Moreover, we propose a scheme based on Zero Knowledge Proof of Retrievability (ZK BLS-PoR) to ensure the trustiness of the data digest and the proofs to the blockchain. Any user in the system can check the data completeness by verifying the proofs instead of downloading and examining the whole data based on the proposed ZK BLS- PoR scheme, which can provide solid theoretical verification. In all, the proposed T²L framework is a traceable and trustable logistics system with a high level of security.