Blockchain-Based Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Security for Counterfeit Drug Prevention

The current study aims to propose a secure, blockchain-integrated model for the pharmaceutical supply chain aimed at combating the ever-prevailing problem of the proliferation of counterfeit medicines. The framework provides end-to-end tamper-proof traceability for all tiers of the supply chain and inter-node distance, as well as the physical monitoring gaps, which the existing serialisation schemes are unable to monitor. The comparative analysis of blockchain architecture types provides evidence that consortium permissioned blockchain architectures provide better throughput, data confidentiality, compliance and multi-party trust than both public and private blockchain architectures. The performance features that are suited for large national-scale pharmaceutical serialisation workloads have been selected for PBFT consensus and are the basis for the selection.PBFT consensus has been chosen for its performance features: deterministic finality, BFT fault tolerance, and Hyperledger Fabric compatibility. The smart-contract architecture provides programmatic and immutable enforcement of supply-chain business rules: au-tomatic sequence of custody transfers, expiry management, automated policy alerting, etc., without the need for trusted intermediaries and without the delay of manual verification among existing deployments. The hybrid IPFS-based stor-age model further expands the use of the model’s practical scalability to high-frequency IoT telemetry volumes without compromising the cryptographic integrity guarantees that are a core part of the anti-counterfeiting value proposition of blockchain. The formal security analysis shows that the proposed sys-tem is resistant against the main attack techniques that pose threats to pharmaceutical blockchain systems, which include mitigative measures such as cryptographic hardware security, role-based access control, multi-signature governance, and selectively disclosure via zero-knowledge-proofs. The pro-posed framework represents a step towards implementing a standards-based, interoperable and economically viable trace-ability framework that directly contributes to the goals of UN SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and is part of the larger agenda of transparent, accountable healthcare supply-chain governance. Going forward, further research is planned to explore scalable BFT consensus mechanisms such as HotStuff for wide-ranging deployments and the use of cutting-edge zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs) to ensure privacy-preserving regulatory audits. In addition, we are work-ing to bring the lightest possible verification logic at the IoT edge to perform real-time screening and investigate NFTs for drug identities to prevent batch splitting. This framework can eventually be interconnected with larger, decentralized healthcare systems that include clinical trials and patient data management by empirical pilot deployments and working with standardisation bodies (GS1, ISO, IEEE).

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