Secure electronic bills of lading: blind counts and digital signatures

  • Authors:
  • Anastasia Pagnoni;Andrea Visconti

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy 20135;Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy 20135

  • Venue:
  • Electronic Commerce Research
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Electronic documents used in the framework of the goods delivery industry--i.e. electronic bills of lading (e-BOLs)--are the enablers of any payment, and therefore exposed to frauds. As of today, e-BOLs are handled by special private companies, which provide paperless trading services through their trade chains. This paper contributes a zero-knowledge open solution to the problem of designing secure electronic bills of lading, in the framework of a shipper-carrier-buyer transmission model. The suggested solution is a cryptographic protocol based on digital signatures and blind merchandise counts--that is, counts that do not reveal any information about actually counted quantities. The model is designed to mitigate a number of security threats and assumes the existence of both a trusted third party and a bank in charge of payment procedures. The paper discusses the drawbacks of the existing proprietary solutions and shows how the suggested open protocol addresses them.