Secure Supply Chain Management

It is a long established and well-known fact that supply chain management and planning significantly reduce overall costs in a supply chain. Nevertheless, it is not been exploited in practice due the fact that partners are reluctant to share the necessary, but sensitive data, such as unit costs or stock level. This is due to the inherent risks associated with exposing this private data.

SecureSCM proposes to use cryptographic techniques of secure multi-party computation that allow computing the outcome of the supply chain without the data sharing risks should overcome the obstacles to practical adoption. In particular, this project proposes to:

• build novel protocols for data confidentiality during the exchange in supply chain optimization;
• implement and evaluate those protocols under real world constraints using a prototype;
• demonstrate the benefits of data protection in the Aerospace and Logistic industry;
• research the obstacles to practical adoption of collaborative supply chain management;
• build the scientific foundation for privacy-preserving collaborative supply chain management.

SecureSCM will build the first practical solution for secure collaboration of supply chains partners to gain the advantages of collaborative supply chain planning, forecasting, benchmarking, and management while protecting the confidentiality of their business critical data. SecureSCM will enhance the state-of-the-art in:

• cryptography of designing practical secure multi-party computation protocols;
• security engineering of realizing practical privacy-preserving information systems;
• business information systems of using data confidentiality in supply chain management systems.

Furthermore, SecureSCM will realize secure computation protocols for collaborative supply chain management. The privacy guarantees of secure computation, i.e. the confidentiality of the input, remove the data sharing risks, i.e. no one has to reveal its data. Nevertheless, the result of the protocols, i.e. the globally optimized supply chain, has clear cost benefits over currently implemented solutions with local decision making. All the benefits without the costs should be able to overcome the practical resistance to collaborative supply chain management.

SecureSCM therefore increases the security and trust in service architectures for supply chain management. This is in relation to objective ICT-2007.1.4 (b) of the work programme: Security and trust in dynamic and reconfigurable service architectures. Furthermore, the software solution developed by SecureSCM provides a privacy enhancing tool for companies to use in collaborative supply chain management. This is in relation to objective ICT-2007.1.4 (d) of the work programme: Identity management and privacy enhancing tools.