Design of a software architecture supporting business-to-government information sharing to improve public safety and security

Abstract

To ensure public safety and security, it is vitally important for governments to collect information from businesses and analyse it. Such information can be used to determine whether transported goods might be suspicious and therefore require physical inspection. Although businesses are obliged to report some information, they are reluctant to share additional information for fear of sharing competitively sensitive information, becoming liable and not being compliant with the law. These reasons are often overlooked in the design of software architectures for information sharing. In the present research, we followed a design science approach to develop a software architecture for business-to-government information sharing. Based on literature and a case study, we elicited the requirements an architecture that provides for the sharing of information should meet to make it acceptable to businesses. We then developed the architecture and evaluated it against the requirements. The architecture consists of a blockchain that stores events and rules for information sharing that are controlled by businesses. For each event, two parties use their private keys to encrypt its Merkle root to confirm that they know the data are correct. This makes it easy to check whether information is reliable and whether an event should be accepted. Access control, metadata and context information enable the context-based sharing of information. This is combined with the encryption and decryption of data to provide access to certain data within an organisation. Sélinde van Engelenburg

Blockchain Standards and GovernmentApplications

“…In a specific case study, it was explained that in a supply chain and customs context, information sharing between businesses and government could be facilitated via blockchain. In that case study, it was carefully explained that the blockchain framework will be designed under a specific architecture model that would enable the smooth and seamless exchange of information [25].…”

A Blockchain Architecture for Reducing the Bullwhip Effect

“…Blockchain is proposed to support different processes in the domains of supply chain management and business process management as well [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Examples are tracing goods throughout their lifecycle [10,12], conflict resolution in supply chains [14], crowd lending [15], business-to-government information sharing [11] and supply chain integration [13].…”

“…The proposed blockchain designs often incorporate some form of access control. Usually this involves encryption to protect sensitive data or making the blockchain network private (see e.g., [10,11,13,14,16]). However, rarely, an analysis is made of the impact of the chosen form of access control on the perceived benefits of using blockchain technology.…”

“…Some of these can be left out when other data than transactions are shared. Most notably, the steps necessary to provide proof of work might not be required [11]. Based on this, the sharing of data via the blockchain can be as follows:…”

Regulatory Compliance and Over-Compliant Information Sharing – Changes in the B2G Landscape

“…Given the explorative nature of this study, we did not employ a rigorous comparative design, yet revisit the documents and papers on these projects to extract what can be learned from them about the supervision relationship. The authors were involved in these projects [1,2,6,12,34,35], which hurts replicability but we do trade that off with much in-depth, first-hand information. The study is thus based on participatory observation by the authors in these three projects as well as on the documentation in formal project deliverables and papers published on the projects.…”