An Architecture for Trustworthy and Transparent Digital Supply Chains

Traceability of physical and digital artifacts in supply chains is a long-standing, but increasingly serious security concern. The rise in popularity of verifiable data structures as a mechanism to make actors more accountable for breaching their compliance promises has found some successful applications to specific use cases (such as the supply chain for digital certificates), but lacks a generic and scalable architecture that can address a wider range of use cases. This memo defines a generic and scalable architecture to enable transparency across any supply chain with minimum adoption barriers for producers (who can register their claims on any TS, with the guarantee that all consumers will be able to verify them) and enough flexibility to allow different implementations of Transparency Services with various auditing and compliance requirements. Abstract A transparent and authentic ledger service in support of a supply chain’s integrity, transparency, and trust requires all peers that contribute to the ledgers operations to be trustworthy and authentic. In this document, a countersigning variant is specified that enables trust assertions on merkle-tree based operations for global supply chain ledgers. A generic procedure how to produce payloads for signing and validation is defined and leverages solutions and principles from the Concise Signing and Encryption (COSE) space.