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Secure electronic bills of lading: blind counts and digital signatures

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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.

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  1. Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Comelico 39/41, Milano, 20135, Italy

    Anastasia Pagnoni & Andrea Visconti

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  1. Anastasia Pagnoni
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  2. Andrea Visconti
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Correspondence to Anastasia Pagnoni.

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Pagnoni, A., Visconti, A. Secure electronic bills of lading: blind counts and digital signatures. Electron Commer Res 10, 363–388 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-010-9060-2

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