Digital Immunity for the U.S. Supply Chain: Preventing Data Loss in Moving Vehicles

Mobile assets across the United States supply chain—including trucks, rail systems, maritime platforms, and defense vehicles—continuously generate operational data that supports safety, compliance, predictive maintenance, and real-time coordination. Unlike stationary IoT deployments, these systems operate under unstable connectivity, frequent power interruptions, and prolonged network gaps. In practice, this environment can produce a troubling outcome: data created in the field may disappear long before anyone realizes it is missing. Traditional mechanisms such as retries, bounded buffering, and best-effort streaming improve transfer reliability when networks cooperate, but they offer limited protection when failures occur mid-journey and edge state is lost. Once volatile state disappears, reconstruction is often impossible even if connectivity is later restored. This paper introduces Digital Immunity, a data-centric architectural approach that treats survivability of operational history as a system invariant rather than an optimistic assumption. A digitally immune system ensures that events generated at the edge remain durable, ordered, and provably recoverable even after disconnection, restart, or delayed synchronization. We formalize digital immunity through verifiable properties including durable persistence at creation time, preservation of temporal and causal structure, replay safety, and bounded divergence between physical assets and their digital twins. To operationalize these guarantees, we present a reference architecture spanning persistent edge capture, opportunistic transport, replay-aware ingestion, and deterministic twin reconciliation. We evaluate the approach against representative mobility disruptions such as extended blackout, mid-transit restart, partial upload, and severe reordering. Across scenarios, the system maintains complete event history and enables predictable convergence without irreversible loss. By reframing resilience as provable continuity of data instead of restoration of connectivity, digital immunity provides a practical foundation for trustworthy mobile IoT platforms at national scale.