DEFenD: A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Decentralized System for Freight Declaration

Abstract

Millions of shipping containers filled with goods move around the world every day. Before such a container may enter a trade bloc, the customs agency of the goods' destination country must ensure that it does not contain illegal or mislabeled goods. Due to the high volume of containers, customs agencies make a selection of containers to audit through a risk analysis procedure. Customs agencies perform risk analysis using data sourced from a centralized system that is potentially vulnerable to manipulation and malpractice. Therefore we propose an alternative: DEFEND, a decentralized system that stores data about goods and containers in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. In our system, economic operators make claims to the network about goods they insert into or remove from containers, and encrypt these claims so that they can only be read by the destination country's customs agency. Economic operators also make unencrypted claims about containers with which they interact. Unencrypted claims can be validated by the entire network of customs agencies. Our key contribution is a data partitioning scheme and several protocols that enable such a system to utilize blockchain and its powerful validation principle, while also preserving the privacy of the involved economic operators. Using our protocol, customs agencies can improve their risk analysis and economic operators can get through customs with less delay. We also present a reference implementation built with Hyperledger Fabric and analyze to what extent our implementation meets the requirements in terms of privacy-preservation, security, scalability, and decentralization.

Blockchain technology as an enabler for cross‐sectoral systems integration for developing smart sustainable cities

“…Remarkable work carried out by the authors in ref. [62] leveraging the decentralisation phenomenon of Blockchain network with secure and anonymous sending of the information of goods and containers keeping the goods to all involved parties, as the freight is between a defined sender and receiver, the sender sends the goods with encrypted data over the Blockchain network which can only be decrypted by the governance bodies (i.e. customs or the receiver entity).…”

A taxonomy study on securing Blockchain-based Industrial applications: An overview, application perspectives, requirements, attacks, countermeasures, and open issues

“…In the healthcare industry, a Blockchain-based application [15] is proposed to address the specific needs and requirements of national health infrastructure organisations to control and manage additional healthrelated organisations and sectors for secure communication. In transport and logistics, a Blockchain-based secure and decentralised application called DEFEND [16] is proposed to protect the data privacy of shipping items stored in containers. Finally, in a SG environment, a private Blockchain-based decentralised application [17] is designed to provide secure end-to-end communication between the smart meter and SG without the need of any trusted third party.…”

“…Vos et al [16] proposed DEFEND, a secure decentralised Blockchain-based platform that achieves ''data privacy'' and anonymity of containers and store goods. The sending agency claims to transmit items, encrypts them, and sends them to other destination agencies.…”

A Taxonomy Study on Securing Blockchain-based Industrial Applications: An Overview, Application Perspectives, Requirements, Attacks, Countermeasures, and Open Issues

“…To protect the "data privacy" of shipping items, Vos et al [257] proposed DEFEND, a secure decentralised Blockchainbased platform that protects the privacy of containers and the store items. In this system, the sending agency carries out the following tasks: make a claim of sending items, encrypt the claim and send it to other destination agencies.…”

“…The blocks are linked with other blocks so that the hash of the previous block is stored in the header of the next block to form a complete hash chain. Moreover, hash functions are used in different Blockchain applications such as financial systems [231,283], eHealth [249], IoT [266,268], IoT [11,284,285] and crowdsensing [257] to achieve the security and privacy of transactions and users.…”