Utilization of Homomorphic Cryptosystems for Information Exchange in Value Chains

Information plays a significant role in modern process industries due to the demand for flexibility and mobility in production. Therefore, it is important to preserve the privacy and security of the information exchanged and shared between partners in value chains, for instance asset chains or supply chains. Since many companies have their own technological solutions and methods for operation and control, this information is regarded as their intellectual property. For the protection of recipes, material flows, or operational and control variables during the manufacturing of products, various methods are available. These techniques include anonymization and encryption solutions. To deal with mathematical models and the computation of formulas, homomorphic encryption schemes can be applied to the data which have to be shared within a value chain. Based on the experience of previous implementations of homomorphic crypto system in different domains, the opportunities for adaptation of encryption methods in process industries are considered. This paper proposes the application of homomorphic encryption in a value chain and defines a specific protocol that enables the Paillier cryptosystem on a time series. A use case is designed for confidential information exchange between a secret owner and a value provider in a value chain. The architecture of confidentiality-preserving information sharing satisfies the zero-knowledge proof requirement and shows low similarity between original and recovered messages.