A DLT- and ZKP-Enabled Framework for Privacy-Preserving Digital Product Passports in Maritime Container Logistics

Background: Maritime container shipping carries over 80% of global trade, yet compliance verification creates a confidentiality–verifiability conflict: carriers treat telemetry as commercially sensitive, while regulators, insurers, and port authorities require verifiable proof that cargo remained within specification. The EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) mandates Digital Product Passports (DPPs), but no standardised DPP architecture exists for the multi-stakeholder maritime domain. Methods: We present Ocean DPP, a blockchain-anchored platform combining GS1 EPCIS 2.0, oneM2M, IOTA, and Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), letting stakeholders verify compliance predicates without revealing raw sensor values; Merkle-tree batching reduces anchoring costs. We evaluate it in 16 experiments on a single-host testbed using synthetic workloads and a local IOTA network. Results: The platform achieved 95th-percentile latency of 48 ms without ZKP and 500 ms with proof generation, throughput of 7 events/s per host, 304 ms mean proof generation and 9.8 ms verification, 100% EPCIS 2.0 compliance, and zero permanent message loss across four failure-injection scenarios; horizontal scaling reduced the median latency by 37%. Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge, Ocean DPP is the first implemented, quantitatively evaluated platform integrating EPCIS 2.0, oneM2M, IOTA, and Groth16 ZKPs for privacy-preserving maritime DPPs; broader multi-host and public-network validation remains for future work.