Bootstrapping Procurement

Jan Pennekamp, Markus Dahlmanns, Frederik Fuhrmann, Timo Heutmann, Alexander Kreppein, Dennis Grunert, Christoph Lange, Robert H. Schmitt, Klaus Wehrle

Offering Two-Way Privacy for Evolved Purchase Inquiries

ACM Transactions on Internet Technology

Dynamic and flexible business relationships are expected to become more important in the future to accommodate specialized change requests or small-batch production. Today, buyers and sellers must disclose sensitive information on products upfront before the actual manufacturing. However, without a trust relation, this situation is precarious for the involved companies as they fear for their competitiveness. Related work overlooks this issue so far: Existing approaches only protect the information of a single party only, hindering dynamic and on-demand business relationships. To account for the corresponding research gap of inadequately privacy-protected information and to deal with companies without an established trust relation, we pursue the direction of innovative privacy-preserving purchase inquiries that seamlessly integrate into today's established supplier management and procurement processes. Utilizing well-established building blocks from private computing, such as private set intersection and homomorphic encryption, we propose two designs with slightly different privacy and performance implications to securely realize purchase inquiries over the Internet. In particular, we allow buyers to consider more potential sellers without sharing sensitive information and relieve sellers of the burden of repeatedly preparing elaborate yet discarded offers. We demonstrate our approaches' scalability using two real-world use cases from the domain of production technology. Overall, we present deployable designs that offer two-way privacy for purchase inquiries and, in turn, fill a gap that currently hinders establishing dynamic and flexible business relationships. In the future, we expect significantly increasing research activity in this overlooked area to address the needs of an evolving production landscape.

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Jan Pennekamp, Frederik Fuhrmann, Markus Dahlmanns, Timo Heutmann, Alexander Kreppein, Dennis Grunert, Christoph Lange, Robert H. Schmitt, Klaus Wehrle

Confidential Computing-Induced Privacy Benefits for the Bootstrapping of New Business Relationships

Blitz Talk at the 2021 Cloud Computing Security Workshop (CCSW ‘21), co-located with the 28th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ‘21), November 15-19, 2021, Seoul, Korea

In addition to quality improvements and cost reductions, dynamic and flexible business relationships are expected to become more important in the future to account for specific customer change requests or small-batch production. Today, despite reservation, sensitive information must be shared upfront between buyers and sellers. However, without a trust relation, this situation is precarious for the involved companies as they fear for their competitiveness following information leaks or breaches of their privacy. To address this issue, the concepts of confidential computing and cloud computing come to mind as they promise to offer scalable approaches that preserve the privacy of participating companies. In particular, designs building on confidential computing can help to technically enforce privacy. Moreover, cloud computing constitutes an elegant design choice to scale these novel protocols to industry needs while limiting the setup and management overhead for practitioners. Thus, novel approaches in this area can advance the status quo of bootstrapping new relationships as they provide privacy-preserving alternatives that are suitable for immediate deployment.

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