Privacy-Preserving Smart and Secure Contract Solutions for Digital Supply Chain Payments
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63282/3050-9416.IJAIBDCMS-V6I4P127Keywords:
Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts, Digital Supply Chain Payments, Blockchain-Based Settlement, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Secure Multi-Party Workflows, Tokenized Payment Obligations, Confidentiality-Aware Finance, Permissioned BlockchainAbstract
Digital supply chain payments increasingly rely on automated and distributed platforms, yet existing solutions struggle to balance transparency with the confidentiality required by commercial and financial stakeholders. While blockchain-based smart contracts enable tamper-evident settlement and traceability, they often expose sensitive transaction metadata, contractual terms, and risk indicators, limiting adoption in multi-party supply chain environments. This paper presents a privacy-preserving smart and secure contract framework for digital supply chain payments that separates correctness verification from information disclosure. The proposed model combines a permissioned or consortium blockchain with off-chain encrypted data storage, cryptographic commitment schemes, and zero-knowledge proofs to ensure that payment obligations, milestone fulfillment, and financing conditions can be verified without revealing proprietary business details. Tokenized payment obligations represent invoices and receivables on the ledger, while milestone-based smart contracts coordinate delivery confirmation, early financing, dispute resolution, and settlement. Sensitive financial data and documents remain off-chain, anchored to the ledger only through hashes, commitments, and succinct proofs. Optional confidential computing components further enable secure evaluation of dynamic pricing or credit logic. A comprehensive security analysis demonstrates resistance to unauthorized state modification, double financing, insider misuse, and inference attacks under both honest-but-curious and malicious adversary models. Performance evaluation shows that the computational and communication overhead introduced by privacy-preserving mechanisms remains practical for real-world supply chain payment workflows, with low latency, efficient storage growth, and scalable operation across multi-tier ecosystems. The results indicate that the proposed framework provides a viable foundation for secure, privacy-aware, and auditable digital supply chain finance.
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