Trust-Enabled Energy Efficient Protocol for Secure Remote Sensing in Supply Chain Management

Trust and energy efficiency are key requirements in remote sensing devices, which are frequently deployed in electronic commerce supply chain management. This remote sensing is facilitated by wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which have been integrated into the e-commerce landscape. These WSNs provide various services, including product tracking, monitoring, optimization and design evolution. This integration is evident in Logistics 4.0, whose aim is to enhance adaptability, intelligence and resilience in supply chain management and logistics. However, due to the limited energy, memory, communication and computing power of the sensors deployed in WSNs, numerous energy consumption reduction approaches have been proposed. Nevertheless, these techniques often overlook security and privacy aspects, which are crucial for fostering trust in an e-commerce ecosystem. Consequently, various schemes have been developed to bridge this gap. Unfortunately, these protocols often exhibit vulnerabilities and privacy loopholes that can compromise trust among e-commerce stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a trust-enabled energy efficient protocol for secure remote sensing in supply chain management. Performance evaluation demonstrates that our protocol incurs the lowest energy, computation and communication complexities compared to existing solutions. Additionally, it provides essential security features, including session key agreement, mutual authentication, key secrecy, untraceability and anonymity. These features are critical for trust preservation in e-commerce. Our semantic security analysis confirms the protocol’s resilience against various attacks. In addition, its formal security analysis using the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model validates the security of the negotiated session key.