On the drawing board

The challenge

More than 90 percent of world trade travels in containers aboard ocean-going ships, which equates to some 20 million containers passing through 220 ports around the world every year. Security issues are an important, though complicated, factor in this multifaceted global logistics chain. In most countries, only a small percentage of these containers—just two percent in the United States, for example—is inspected for explosives or hazardous material. Criminal and terrorist threats pose a significant challenge to the trade and cargo industries, which are urgently searching for new ways to establish a more secure global logistic chain across a complex, and often conflicting, network of manufacturers, distributors, freight forwarders, port authorities, ocean carriers and distribution centers.

The approach

Closing the gap between stakeholders, embedding security across the logistics chain and providing critical data at every point of interaction with container-based goods would go a long way towards a more secure shipping trade. Experts at the IBM Research Lab in Zurich set out to meet these goals by developing a solution that addresses the logistical and physical challenges inherent in an end-to-end, secure trade chain. The resulting Secure Trade Lane solution concept provides trade stakeholders with a practical plan and the accompanying technology to support more secure goods tracking worldwide. If adopted across the supply chain, Secure Trade Lane can deliver a trusted string of information to help provide highly secure status updates of a container, real-time monitoring of the container and tools for settlement of payments, authorization and maintenance.

The Secure Trade Lane solution concept provides a reliable and verifiable means of collecting a trail of evidence about events concerning a container from the origin of its journey to final destination. This evidence can then be used by various stakeholders to perform risk analysis and assess the container security and integrity, and to optimize and simplify business processes. The evidence collected can include when and where the container was loaded, what goods the container held, the various entities (shipper, carriers, port operators, etc.) that transported or handled the container, the route followed by the container, the presence of certain chemicals in the container, attempts to break into the container and multiple additional criteria.

However, for risk analysis to be meaningful, the evidence collected has to be reliable and verifiable. In the proposed solution concept, evidence is collected in a Tamper-Resistant Embedded Controller (TREC) that is an integral part of the container. The TREC acts as a central point of control that can authenticate the source of evidence and implement access control to the evidence. It integrates a variety of commercial electronic sensors to detect container events such as door opening, shock, vibration, environmental changes and location. The TREC platform is unique in the level of security and functionality it offers, going well beyond what is achievable with standard RFID technology.

Next steps

Global instability and the resulting increase in legislation in many countries are pushing security issues up the priority list for trade-related organizations worldwide. As customs agencies, freight forwarders, shippers and other trade stakeholders begin the search for a comprehensive alternative to the partial solutions currently on the market, they will discover Secure Trade Lane to be an efficient, cost-effective solution option. The next step is to develop a TREC prototype and demonstrate the validity of the concept in a pilot program with a client.