Secure alert tracking in supply chain

Risk management practices, techniques and tools with respect to companies´ supply chains have begun to receive more attention recently, as the need to improve supply chain performances has increased in order to keep the balance between financial considerations and those of the customer interests. With the multiplication of intermediate actors, a single threat at one point might compromise the safety of the all actors involved in the supply chain process. Therefore, there is a clear need for product tracking in order to trace anomalies for mitigation of potential threats in the future. Traditional approaches rely on operator-assisted verification procedures that mainly suffer from the lack of global coverage. In this paper, we propose an automated process to securely trace the supply chain actors that interact with the product, as well as the operations that were performed, and the alerts that got raised. The core component of this process is wireless sensor nodes attached to the product. Empowered with sensing capabilities, wireless sensor nodes are meant to raise alert in case of detection of an anomaly. Our solution allows for tracing the path taken by a product and the recording of the alerts that got raised, while preserving the actors´ privacy. The solution combines a polynomial path encoding technique, together with additive homomorphic encryption to ensure the correctness of the path taken by a product, and to preserve the privacy of the actors, respectively.