Self-Sovereign Identity for Privacy-Preserving Shipping Verification System

Abstract

Internet made it easier for organizations and individuals to collaborate with each other in different activities in order to provide new goods and services to their customers. As for example, e-commerce facilitates the discovery of new partners and allows companies to conduct business. However, in such open environment ensuring transparency of the supply chain activities and privacy of the customers is a challenging task. Indeed, individuals do not know each other and the centralized architecture of Internet services does not allow individuals to control their credentials. To overcome this challenge, this paper exploits the concept of Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) for providing digital identity, trust, and privacy in the context of a Shipping Verification System, a very important activity in supply chain management. In particular, the proposed system relies on decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, and blockchain to allow customers to monitor the shipment of items by a shipping deliverer, on behalf of a marketplace. We implemented an instance of the proposed system, and we show that it achieves good performance results in two popular deployment configurations: a Local Indy Pool (consisting of 4 nodes) and the Sovrin BuilderNet (a developer test network consisting of 17 node).