A multilevel authentication-based blockchain powered medicine anti-counterfeiting for reliable IoT supply chain management.

In this paper, a novel blockchain-based multilevel security and authentication application is proposed to address the problem of counterfeiting in the medicine supply chain. In this blockchain-enabled application, multiple computers owned by different supply chain organizations collaborate in a distributed fashion to establish a trustworthy network. By adopting a resource-efficient Hyperledger Fabric framework, the proposed system aims to enhance transparency, integrity, and traceability in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Hyperledger Fabric blockchain also adds network security, privacy preservation, real-time tracking, and reliability features to the proposed system. Moreover, the proposed system also incorporates a blockchain-based QR code watermarking layer for authentication and verification. A validation module is designed that empowers buyers to validate the identity and history of serialized medicinal products, and buyer identity validation ensures that only legitimate buyers can access the products. Simulation outcomes and performance measurements demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system, including location traceability, QR code authentication, and verification. The Caliper tool has been used to measure the performance of the proposed system in terms of execution time, throughput, latency, and resource statistics for up to 100,000 transactions and 20 peers. The highest throughput achieved is 417.5 TPS (transactions per second) with 100,000 transactions and eight peers. The QR code authentication performance is tested under various noisy, cropped, and blurred attacks. We presented simulation outcomes of the implemented supply chain as well as chain code algorithms. The results indicate improved scalability, validation mechanisms, throughput, latency, and resource consumption compared to existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]