This paper discusses various techniques that may be used to combat counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical supply chain. These include the use of electronic pedigrees (to ensure the integrity of the supply chain), together with mass-serialization (to provide for a unique lifecycle history of each individual package) and authentication of the product (to check for any discrepancies in the various attributes of the product and its packaging are as intended for that individual package). Management of the pedigree process and product authentication is discussed in some detail, together with various other learnings from the Drug Security Network, including identification of some remaining vulnerabilities and suggestions for tightening these loopholes.
This paper also appears in the book: Networked RFID Systems and Lightweight Cryptography Raising Barriers to Product Counterfeiting Cole, Peter H.; Ranasinghe, Damith C. (Eds.) 2007, Approx. 360 p., Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-540-71640-2 www.springer.com/dal/home/generic/search/results
It is the goal of this workshop to bring together researchers from the fields of recommender systems, pervasive computing, mobile computing, urban sensing, social networking, context-aware systems and...