Notary Group-Based Cross-Chain Traceability Scheme for Cold Chain Logistics

Blockchain technology has brought a deep-going revolution for current food cold chain (FCC) systems in recent years. However, there emerge the problems of data island and privacy leakage with the increase of different types of food cold chains. This paper proposes a cross-chain traceability scheme for FCC logistics based on a notary group mechanism. Firstly, a notary group mechanism is constructed, which consists of high-credit nodes selected from different FCC logistics entities by an election strategy. This notary group maintains a cross-chain transaction ledger and takes responsibility for verifying and recording cross-chain logistics data-sharing transactions. Meanwhile, a cross-chain traceability scheme is designed through smart contracts, which utilize a ring signature mechanism to achieve automatic verification and traceability for cross-chain transactions. Then, an analysis of the data privacy security and cross-chain transaction privacy security shows that the scheme reduces the degree of centralization while ensuring the security of cross-chain transactions. Transaction throughput and latency performance evaluations show that the scheme has good traceability efficiency.