TL;DR: The thesis of this dissertation is that a robust, scalable, counterfeiting-resistant supply chain management system is needed to combat counterfeiting products.
Abstract: Counterfeit products, especially in the pharmaceutical sector, have plagued the international community for decades [56]. To combat this problem, many anti-counterfeiting approaches have been proposed [43,79,88,99]. They use either Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or Near Field Communication (NFC) physical tags affixed to the products. Current anti-counterfeiting approaches detect two counterfeiting attacks: (1) modifications to a product’s tag details, such as changing the expiration date; and (2) cloning of a genuine product’s details to reuse on counterfeit products. In addition, these anti-counterfeiting approaches track-and-trace the physical locations of products as the products flow through supply chains. Existing approaches suffer from two main drawbacks. They cannot detect tag reapplication attacks, wherein a counterfeiter removes a legitimate tag from a genuine product and reapplies it to a counterfeit or expired product. Second, most existing approaches typically rely on a central server to authenticate products. This is not scalable and creates tremendous processing burden on the server, since significant volumes of products flood through the supply chain’s nodes. In addition, centralized supply chains require substantial data storage to store authentication records for all products. Moreover, as with centralized systems, traditional supply chains inherently have the problem of a single-point of failure. The thesis of this dissertation is that a robust, scalable, counterfeiting-resistant