Blockchain-based secure and scalable supply chain management system to prevent drug counterfeiting

A drug supply chain comprises the entire process starting from producing a drug using raw materials to delivering it to the consumer. To ensure safe and reliable delivery of drugs to consumers, a well-managed Supply Chain Management (SCM) system is needed. In traditional SCM systems, tracking a drug throughout the chain is difficult, which increases the chances of counterfeiting drugs. Moreover, traditional SCM systems face the scalability issue because they can process limited information. In this paper, a blockchain-based scheme is proposed by using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to solve the problems of traditional SCMs. Here, the information generated during the manufacturing of drugs, as well as the details of transactions, are stored in the IPFS, so that no data can be tampered with at any time. In the proposed scheme, smart contracts are implemented to automate the execution of the entire SCM system, and the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm is used to validate the transactions. Many experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of throughput, communication cost, and many more. Security analysis and performance analysis of the proposed scheme show its efficiency compared to the well-known existing schemes.