Enhancing Trust in Industry 4.0 Traceability Data using Confidentiality-Preserving Digital Ledger

Industry 4.0 brings major changes in manufacturing process management. Third parties, such as providers, customers and suppliers are more prone to interact with the traceability system of a factory in order to obtain full transparency on a product manufacturing process. Several solutions, including blockchain-based approaches, have been proposed in order to reinforce trust in such systems. However, many factory owners are still sceptic about deploying such solutions, notably due to confidentiality threats to the factory’s data that could be included in traceability data. This paper investigates a way to include critical data of a factory in a blockchain-based traceability system, and to validate the related transactions with third parties without compromising confidentiality. We describe our proposal for a digital ledger based traceability system using the Multichain platform. In addition to confidentiality-preserving properties, we show how other issues such as energy consumption and storage volume could be controlled through Multichain functionalities.