Implementing a Digital Product Passport to Support the Open-Source Hardware Community

This article presents a Digital Product Passport (DPP) technology for Open-Source Hardware (OSH) use cases. A DPP is a tool to provide physical products with a record of digital information about them, analogous to what might be imagined as a passport for Digital Twins. Such a passport may document non-observable attributes of products, such as their age, people involved in their creation, the licenses of designs used, locations they have travelled to and their current owner. In our tentative implementation and proposal for standard components, we focus on adopting a graph database of information, the REA (Resource-Event-Agent) accounting system and the Valueflows vocabulary to trace resources, events, and agents. Working in a federated environment where DPPs can be exported and authenticated even when they cross different contexts, we also examine how cryptography is used to ensure the integrity of DPPs by relying on authenticity rather than authorization.