eSeal – A System for Enhanced Electronic Assertion of Authenticity and Integrity

Abstract

Ensuring authenticity and integrity are important tasks when dealing with goods. While in the past seal wax was used to ensure the integrity, electronic devices are now able to take over this functionality and provide better, more fine grained, more automated and more secure supervision. This paper presents eSeal, a system with a computational device at its core that can be attached to a good, services in the network and a communication protocol. The system is able to control various kinds of integrity settings and to notify authenticated instances about consequent violations of integrity. The system works without infrastructure so that goods can be supervised that are only accessible in certain locations. The paper motivates the eSeal system and its design decisions, lists several types of integrity scenarios, presents the communication protocol and identifies practical conditions for design and implementation. An implementation in a business relevant scenario is presented as a proof of concept. The eSeal system, see Figure 2, consists of three conceptual layers: (1) the Contractual, (2) the Logical, and (3) the Technical.

Using Cooperative Artefacts as Basis for Activity Recognition

“…for tracking of moveable assets [18,26]. Particulary close in spirit is the eSeal system in which artefacts are instrumented with embedded sensing and perception autonomously monitor their physical integrity [9].…”

“…Specifically, instrumentation of otherwise non-computational artefacts has been shown to play an important role, e.g. for tracking of valuable goods [9,18,26], detecting safety critical situations [28], or supporting human memory [17]. In most augmented artefact applications artefacts are instrumented to support their identification [18,21,26] while perception, reasoning and decision-making is allocated in backend infrastructures [1,6] or user devices [23,27].…”

MoCoA: Customisable Middleware for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

“…They are typically only appropriate for a single application domain or deployment scenario, e.g., smart spaces [2,3], tracking of valuable goods [4,5] or robotics [6,7]. Moreover, they fail to handle some or all of the non-functional requirements expected of emerging context-aware applications such as timeliness, reliability, mobility and scalability.…”

Cost-Benefit Model for Smart Items in the Supply Chain

“…The following example of the logistics process is derived from previous experiences in [2], [10] and [11]. This example draws a picture of a supply chain process that uses most advanced Smart Item technology.…”

“…Figure 3 illustrates the smart logistics process using Smart Items. Following the eSeal approach in [10], the The shipper plans the routes separately. The different orders are summarized and re-organized in a cross-dock (X-Dock) in order to optimize the utilization of trucks.…”