Zero-Disclosure Material Passports for Verifiable Provenance in Multi-Tier Supply Networks

Global supply chains produce vast quantities of transactional data, yet most existing traceability systems force companies to choose between disclosing sensitive commercial relationships to a shared infrastructure and relying on mech-anisms that do not provide strong privacy guarantees. This study introduces a zero-disclosure material passport framework for verifiable provenance in multi-tier supply networks. The framework represents product history as a Resource-Event-Agent provenance graph and authenticates each event through unlinkable aggregate signatures. Individual participant signatures collapse into a single, fixed-size aggregate proof, so the crypto-graphic verification object remains 192 bytes in size regardless of the supply chain depth. Selective disclosure is supported through commitment-based predicate proofs that allow regulators and auditors to verify attributes such as origin, certification status, or recycled-content thresholds without learning unrelated commercial information. A Rust prototype was evaluated on an x86-64 workstation, a Raspberry Pi 4, and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Signing latency remained below 700 ms on the most constrained device, demonstrating feasibility for low-frequency supply chain handover events and offline inspection contexts. The study further provides algorithmic descriptions of credential issuance, passport update, aggregate verification, and selective disclosure; an expanded comparison against blockchain, EDI, BBS+/anonymous-credential, and zk-SNARK-based approaches; and a discussion of the centralized Credential Authority as an explicit trust assumption. Security analysis establishes unforge-ability and unlinkability under standard hardness assumptions when the Credential Authority is honest, and participant creden-tials are issued through the prescribed blinded protocol.

@article{Dharmavaram2026,
  title     = {Zero-Disclosure Material Passports for Verifiable Provenance in Multi-Tier Supply Networks},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {17},
  number    = {6},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Shivani Dharmavaram},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170602},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170602}
}