zkLogis: Scalable, Privacy-Enhanced, and Traceable Logistics on Public Blockchain

Abstract

Decentralized blockchain systems have provided a significant leap in autonomous logistics practices by enabling accurate product authentication through the tracking of ownership changes. Although public blockchains could provide open access to stored information, privacy and security concerns lead most existing logistics implementations to rely on private or consortium blockchains. This, however, limits or regulates the end-customer’s ability to independently verify product provenance. This paper introduces a novel logistics system, zkLogis, a novel privacy-enhancing logistics system on public blockchain that utilizes zero-knowledge proofs to ensure transaction validity, while restricting access to decipher encrypted logistics data to authorized users. Additionally, zkLogis supports scalable group transfers by treating multiple items as a single unit. We employ a zk-SNARK to guarantee the validity of every transaction while permitting only authorized users to verify the provenance of their own products. Furthermore, we define the security notions inherent to zkLogis and construct a scheme that satisfies these notions. Our experimental results show that zkLogis achieves a performance of 4.5 seconds for the anonymous group transfer of user ownership, including the execution time of proof generation and smart contracts, when running on a Linux server.