Privacy-Preserving for Blockchain-Enabled Cold-Chain Logistics System With IoV and Linkable Ring Signature

As the demand for frozen and fresh products grows, the security and traceability of cold-chain logistics data have received a lot of attention in recent years. Cold-chain logistics (CCL) systems play an important role in data collecting and sharing, but the traditional centralized CCL systems are vulnerable to threats of data loss, tempering, and privacy disclosure. Aiming at these problems, this paper utilizes blockchain to establish a blockchain-based CCL (BCCL) system to achieve logistics data distributed management and sharing. It also applies the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to construct an IoV-powered BCCL system to realize real-time collection and transmission of logistics data. By the distributed ledger, the cold-chain logistics data cannot be tampered with as the cost of tampering with the transaction is incalculable. Then, to protect privacy security, a linkable ring verification model has been introduced, and a linkable ring signature (LRS) scheme has been proposed to guarantee the verifiability and traceability of transactions in the IoV-powered BCCL system. This LRS can enable the traceability of all transaction records for the same cold-chain product. Moreover, the security proof shows that this LRS can capture the anonymity, unforgeability, and linkability. The comparisons of key size and time costs show that this LRS is also efficient. In addition, the transaction performance evaluations show that the linkable ring verification model can support secure and efficient data-sharing transactions through the IoV-powered BCCL system.