Electronic regulation of data sharing and processing using smart ledger technologies for supply-chain security

Abstract

Traditional centralised data storage and processing solutions manifest limitations with regards to overall operational cost and the security and auditability of data. One of the biggest issues with existing solutions is the difficulty of keeping track of who has had access to the data and how the data may have changed over its lifetime; while providing a secure and easyto-use mechanism to share the data between different users. The ability to electronically regulate data sharing within and across different organisational entities in the supply-chain (SC), is an open issue, that is only addressed partially by existing legal and regulatory compliance frameworks. In this work, we present Cydon, a decentralised data management platform that executes bespoke distributed applications utilising a novel search and retrieve algorithm leveraging metadata attributes. Cydon utilises a smart distributed ledger to offer an immutable audit trail and transaction history for all different levels of data access and modification within a SC and for all data flows within the environment. Results suggest that Cydon provides authorised and fast access to secure distributed data, avoids single points of failure by securely distributing encrypted data across different nodes while maintains an "always-on" chain of custody.