A BLOCKCHAIN-BASED SYSTEM FOR PREVENTING DRUG COUNTERFEIT

Abstract

The drugs industry is one of the most popular industrial areas, which suffers from counterfeit and loss of integrity. For instance, the proportion of counterfeit drugs in the world reached 10-15%. This paper proposes a secure Blockchain-based system for reducing drug counterfeit. The proposed system was implemented using the NodeJS language with a hyper ledger fabric platform. We analyzed network overheads to assess how many network messages we need to reach a consensus on a single block. The results show that to reach a consensus in a system of N peers, 2N*(N-1) messages are required. In addition, the proposed system has high performance in terms of less time needed to validate and append transactions into BC system.

Full text

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology
15th March 2022. Vol.100. No 5
© 2022 Little Lion Scientific
ISSN: 1992-8645 www.jatit.org E-ISSN: 1817-3195
1615
A BLOCKCHAIN-BASED SYSTEM FOR PREVENTING
DRUG COUNTERFEIT
ABDULLAH QUZMAR
1
, SARAH ALMAAITAH
2
, AND MOHAMMAD QATAWNEH
3
1Department of Computer Science – The University of Jordan
2Department of Computer Science – The University of Jordan
3Department of Computer Science – The University of Jordan
abd8181691@ju.edu.jo, sarah.khaldun17@gmail.com, mohd.qat@ju.edu.jo
ABSTRACT
The drugs industry is one of the most popular industrial areas, which suffers from counterfeit and loss of
integrity. For instance, the proportion of counterfeit drugs in the world reached 10-15%. This paper
proposes a secure Blockchain-based system for reducing drug counterfeit. The proposed system was
implemented using the NodeJS language with a hyper ledger fabric platform. We analyzed network
overheads to assess how many network messages we need to reach a consensus on a single block. The
results show that to reach a consensus in a system of N peers, 2N*(N-1) messages are required. In addition,
the proposed system has high performance in terms of less time needed to validate and append transactions
into BC system.
Keywords: Blockchain, Counterfeiting, Hyper Ledger Fabric, Consensus, Smart Contract.
1. INTRODUCTION
The process of counterfeiting means faking
something original, with the aim to break down,
rob, or modify the original, for using it in illegal
deals or to trick people into believing that the
fraudulent things are the same as the original.
Counterfeit goods are fakes or unauthorized
versions of the original product. Counterfeit
products are often produced with the intention to
take benefit of the top value of the fake product [1]
[2]. The quality of counterfeit materials is often
bad and dangerous, and one of its main negative
results is a large number of deaths, especially in
pharmaceutical production [3]. Counterfeiting of
drugs reduces the government tax and
pharmaceutical companies’ revenues, and poses
serious health risks to humans. The World Health
Organization (WHO) estimates that counterfeit
drugs make up 15 percent of global drug market
[9][21].
The first step in solving counterfeit medicines is
the recognition of this problem by manufacturers
and governments, and seeking practical solutions
that limit this phenomenon. After investigating
and following up on the methods used by
counterfeiters of medicines, it was found that the
main reason of drug counterfeiting is the lack of
drug supply chain systems that take into account
the manufacturing, transportation and supply
processes of drugs, which ensure drug delivery to
the consumer in a safe way, and this motivates
counterfeiters to continue these illegal acts that
harm society as a whole. Therefore, several anti-
counterfeit mechanisms for drugs have been
proposed, but unfortunately, they have not been
proven to be efficient or help in solving these
problems [8][9].
Recently, a new technology called the Blockchain
(BC) has appeared and used in several domains
like education, health care, smart cities and real
estate, which made it a good candidate to solve the
issue of counterfeit drugs [4][5] [9] [10]. Because
BC technology has a great potential for improving
security, privacy and transparency in the above
domains [9][20][24][25]. Therefore, a broad range
of researchers started to utilize BC technology and
implement it in various areas for solving trust
issues between trustless individuals in different
applications, reducing counterfeit drugs, etc.
[6][7][19]. The rest of this paper is organized as
follows. Section 2 presents the background of BC
technology and related works. Section 3 presents
the proposed BC-based system for preventing drug
counterfeit. Section 4 shows Simulation results
and discussion. Finally, the conclusion is presented
in section 5.

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2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Blockchain is a technology, which has
many attractive features like decentralization,
distribution and immutability that can maintain a
list of secured and linked blocks using several
cryptographic and security techniques like
hashing, digital signature, private and public keys.
There are three main types of Blockchain
networks: public BC, private BC, and hybrid BC.
Public Blockchain is an open system where
anyone can engage, which was introduced for the
first time in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto’s to
underpin BITCOIN [11]. BC removes the
appearance of any third-party or central authority
for management or coordination, then utilizes the
decentralization way of distributed systems in its
full form [12][22][23].
On the other hand, private BC has defined rules
and permissions on network nodes and it is
completely managed by a central organization that
allows specific nodes or participants to engage in
the network [12]. Finally, the hybrid BC, which
mix private and public BC, in this system the
consensus is specified by a group of authenticated
organizations that are pre-selected and has special
permissions, these organizations give read and
access permissions for participants to engage in
the BC system [12] [13].
Several research papers based on BC technology
have been proposed to address the issue of drug
counterfeiting. Haq et al. [6][7][14] proposed a
BC-based system to prevent drugs counterfeiting,
where both sender and receiver in the system share
the public key. The proposed system goes through
many stages starting from manufacturing process
following by transportation and ending delivery a
drugs to medical centers, pharmacies and patients.
Kumar et al. [8][15] proposed a quantitative
analysis on cracking down the fake drug industry
based on BC technology in India. The proposed
framework comprises Pharma department,
extraction unit, manufacturer, distributer and
patient. Their proposed system uses smart contract
and can track the drugs from manufacturing to
delivery steps. The system uses Internet of Things
(IoT) devices like sensors to monitor the
temperature of the drugs store and send gathered
information to BC system. The results shows that
the system performance is good in terms of high
throughput and low latency time as the number of
transactions increased up to 1600 transactions.
Botcha et al. [16] proposed a BC-based system for
Enhancing traceability in pharmaceutical supply
chain using Internet of Things (IoT) to reduce
drugs counterfeit. The main advantage of the
proposed system is the integration of BXC
technology and IoT to address the problem of
drags counterfeiting. Pandey et al. [17] produced a
securing e-health system for counterfeit medicine
penetration based on BC technology. The
framework of the proposed system follows the
rules and standards of the pharmaceutical industry
in India. The system was simulated using a hyper
ledger fabric platform, and its performance was
compared with other existing methods. Singh et al.
[18] developed an IoT system based on BC
technology for temperature monitoring and
counterfeit pharmaceutical prevention. The
proposed system uses sensors to monitor
temperature in order to store drug at an acceptable
temperature to protect it from spoilage. Table one
show a comparison between different research
studies.
Table 1: Studies With Their Contribution, Strengths And
Limitations
Author
s
Contributi
on
Advantages Limitati
ons
Technologi
es
[25] They
Proposed
a further
use case
of
Blockcha
in
technolo
gy in
healthcar
e. and
explaine
d how
Blockcha
in can be
used to
add
traceabili
ty and
visibility
to drugs
supply
and
overcom
e the
issue of
counterfe
iting.
-They
Proposed
new
framewor
k and
implement
ation for
the drugs
system
using
Blockchai
n.
-Used
Ethereum
Blockchai
n.
-The
author
s do
not
present
any
evaluat
ion
criteria
to
show
the
system
accura
cy.
-
Suffers
from
lack of
full
immut
ability.
-The
author
s did
not
explai
n the
main
functio
nalities
in their
-
Smartpho
ne
applicatio
n.
-
Permissio
ned
Ethereum
network.

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15th March 2022. Vol.100. No 5
© 2022 Little Lion Scientific
ISSN: 1992-8645 www.jatit.org E-ISSN: 1817-3195
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system
like
consen
sus
algorit
hm.
[15] Proposed
placing
import
and
export
operation
s of
medicine
s in India
on the
Blockcha
in
system
for it is
ability to
deal with
sensitive
matters
such as
fraud
and
counterfe
iting.
The
proposed
Blockcha
in
system
will
track the
life chain
of a drug
from the
moment
it is
manufact
ured
until it
reaches
the
consume
r.
- A new
framewor
k and
actual
system
work were
presented.
-The third
part does
not exist
in order to
the
implement
ed of
smart
contract.
-The
degrad
ation
of
system
perfor
mance.
- The
lack of
confid
entialit
y.
-
Hyperledg
er Fabric
v1.0
-
CouchDB.
-Linux.
-Caliper
benchmar
king.
[16] Reviews
the
integrati
on of the
Internet
of
Things
with the
Blockcha
in to
reduce
drug
fraud
-Enhance
the
transparen
cy using
the IoT
technolog
y.
-No
evaluat
ion
results
includ
ed.
-IoT
securit
y
proble
ms.
- Private
Blockchai
n.
and
counterfe
iting.
[17] They
proposed
a
complete
health
network
system
to treat
counterfe
it
medicine
s and
discover
them
inside
India
using
Blockcha
in
technolo
gy, and
they also
presente
d the
results of
their
system
and
compare
d it with
other
systems.
-
Implemen
ted real
system
and
compared
it with
other
existing
system.
- High
secure
without
any need
for third
party.
-They
explain all
the
elements
of
Blockchai
n
technolog
y used in
their
system in
detail.
-
Reduci
ng the
numbe
r of
orderin
g or
commi
tting
nodes
can
genera
tes an
attack.
-
Hyperledg
er fabric.
-
Windows
11 64-bit
PCs.
-
Permissio
ned
Blockchai
n network.
-PBFT
algorithm.
[18]. They
introduce
d a
health
system
based on
Blockcha
in
technolo
gy
combine
d with
the
Internet
of
Things
technolo
gy to
track the
drug
from it is
manufact
ure until
it is
arrival to
the user
-Each
thing in
the system
is
traceable
and no
need of
third party
and there
is a smart
contract.
- Digital
water
mark QR
code for
the best
security.
- They
explained
the entire
system
core in the
best brief
way.
-The
raft
consen
sus
algorit
hm
limitati
ons
make
it
suitabl
e only
for
small
networ
ks so
bad
perfor
mance
for
other
sizes
of
networ
k.
-
They
-
Permissio
ned
Blockchai
n.
-
BloXroute
.
-Raft
consensus
algorithm.
-IoT.
-Cloud
storage.
-Elliptic
Curve
Diffie–
Hellman
Key
Exchange
and
Digital
Ring
Signature.

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in
addition
to
monitori
ng it is
temperat
ure.
did not
evaluat
e their
system
with
the
other
related
system
.
We can summarize that limitations of the
Blockchain system are below:
1. Cost when choose the validators.
2. The complexity of the government rules.
3. The Network coverage in the third countries
issues.
4. The illiteracy in using the system.
3. THE PRPOSED METHODOLOGY
The phenomenon of counterfeit medicines in
the world has huge negative effects on several
sectors like health, governments and
pharmaceutical industry. This phenomenon has
caused severe financial losses to governments and
pharmaceutical companies as well as losses in
human lives. Because the traditional systems to
combat this phenomenon could not prevent it or
reduce it. Therefore, the Blockchain technology
can deal with this issue by tracing and controlling
all stages of drug manufacturing process. In this
respect, this section presents and describes the
proposed system BC-based system for preventing
drug counterfeit.
3.1 General Overview of Drug Supply Chain
Management
The general overview of drug supply
chain with Blockchain system is in Figure 1 in
which participants can manage, control and
updates the whole supply chain processes. All data
and information related to the participants of the
system suppliers, manufacturer, distributors,
hospitals, doctors, pharmacy and patients are
stored in the Blockchain-based system. Each user
of the system participants can create and broadcast
their transactions and communicate with the BC
system via client application. This supply chain
system uses a private BC, which ensures that only
authorized users be able to add or view the data by
using their proof of authority concept as shown in
the general overview of drug supply chain
management Figure 1.
Figure 1: Overview of drug supply chain management
system with Blockchain.
3.2 System Architecture of Proposed System
In this research, the system goal is to reduce
the fraud and counterfeiting that accompanies the
process of producing medicines by forming a
reliable ledger that saves all the events related to
medicine in our system. So, we can stop the
manipulation and falsification that can occur to the
drug data in terms of any modification in the
materials, the date of issuance, or any other
manipulation then the stakeholders in this process
can see all the information related to any product
of the medicine and prove that it is an original
product that is not counterfeited in any way.
Blockchain provides a great security mechanism
for the supply chain industry and data
immutability is one of the biggest advantages of
this platform. Similarly, in the case of the
medicine supply chain by storing the data in
distributed peers and providing data immutability,
the system can ensure that every detail and update
process of the medicine is available on the ledger
and any kind of information about any drug is
verified by any stakeholders. Every stakeholder
will be interacting with the Blockchain and will
fetch or save the medicine-related data into the
ledger. This data will not be deleted or tempered as
it will be stored in different peers. In this supply
chain system, a private Blockchain framework
hyper ledger fabric will be used which will ensure
that only authorized people will be able to add or
view the data by using it is proof of authority
concept, and this is what makes us sure that we
can build our proposed system through it. The

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ISSN: 1992-8645 www.jatit.org E-ISSN: 1817-3195
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proposed system architecture comprises four main
components: The front-end, back-end, hyper
ledger network, and database. The end user can
perform many transactions using the client-side
application, which handles by the back-end server.
The back-end server saves or retrieves the data
from the database or the BC hyper ledger fabric
depending on the type of transaction request type.
The backend system uses a hyper ledger fabric
SDK to interact with the hyper ledger network.
The detailed architecture of the proposed system is
shown in the figure 2. The stakeholders in the
proposed system are five stakeholders and their
main duties can be summarized as follows:
1. Manufacturer: It is a registered drug
manufacturing, it will request the raw material of
drugs from supplier, it will check the validity of
these materials and add all things in the block then
it will produce the medicines with unique QR for
each one this information is recorded on the ledger
maintained over a Blockchain network.
2. Supplier: Deliver the raw data using the
transportations (distributor), (the transportation
checks the validity of these raw material and add
them on the block).
3. Distributor: it will check the authenticity of
medicine from the supplier and manufacturer
phase and add them to the block after the
validation; it will not deliver or accept them from
any phase if it's not authentic. It will deliver them
after this process in each stage.
4. Medical sector (Hospitals/pharmacies and
doctors): deliver the medicine for the patients.
5. End user/Patient: check the drug by scanning
the QR code on the drug.
Figure 2: Architecture Of The Proposed System
3.3 Smart Contracts
On Blockchain systems, the purpose of a
smart contract is to give system’s participants the
ability to execute an agreement between different
parties without the need of third party. The smart
contract consists of a predefined set of rules in
which both parties have done an agreement with
each other. The smart contract is immediately
executed when the conditions match the same.
Furthermore, smart contracts help the users to
control the access rights and their assets among
various parties. These smart contracts are stored
and managed in the distributed ledger of the

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology
15th March 2022. Vol.100. No 5
© 2022 Little Lion Scientific
ISSN: 1992-8645 www.jatit.org E-ISSN: 1817-3195
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Blockchain platform, where they are completely
protected and secured from modification by
editing or removing. It is triggered immediately by
the proposed consensus algorithm of the
Blockchain network. In our proposed system, the
smart contract is developed only for two peers
(Validators) from four peers, who are called
endorsement peers; those peers can validate the
transactions.
The smart contract that stored in the Hyper ledger
network has four main components: a model for
representing the stakeholder's classes, a script for
business logic, a set of access control rules in file
for permission or reliability, and queries for
reaching the ledger database (CRUD). In the
proposed system, the smart contract is
implemented in Golang language, which appeared
in 2009 by Google. The interaction between smart
contract program and the application SDK can be
illustrated in the figure 3. A smart contract
contains multiple types of transactions as shown in
figure 4.
Figure 3: Smart Contract Interaction With The Application SDK
.
Figure 4: Transaction Types

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3.4 The Proposed Consensus Mechanism
The Transactions created by the stakeholders
are grouped in a transaction pool with their
timestamp and then sent to validators for
validation, where the number of validators is four
to obtain high level of transparency and achieve
better synchronization in the system. The
consensus mechanism is executed on the backend
side to guarantee that all stakeholders came to
common agreement in order to append the blocks
into BC. In addition, the proposed consensus
mechanism uses Kafka ordering service to
preserve the order of transactions, which means
that if the transactions are sent from the transaction
pool in a certain order, the validator will write
these transactions into a block in the same order,
and all nodes in the system read them in that order.
The proposed consensus algorithm contains three
phases: an endorsement, an ordering, and
committing as shown in the figure 5. The
endorsement phase includes the execution of smart
contract inside the Hyperledger SDK by two peers
selected randomly by the ministry of health. The
smart contract defines the rules that must be met
by all stakeholders. The second phase starts with
the arrangement of transactions using the Kafka
validator service, which provides high throughput
and reduces network bottleneck. The final stage in
our algorithm is the verification or committing
stage, which is carried out through two precise
steps using two functions that have been
programmed to verify that the block is secure by
the complete consensus of all the validators, the
system must obtain a consensus rate in the first
and second function also equal to 75% to be
accepted block and add them to the system
successfully, else the block will be rejected.
Figure 5: The Proposed Consensus Algorithm
[Annex-1].
3.5 Couch DB
The proposed system uses CouchDB as the
BC ledger, which issues rich queries against data
values rather than the keys. In addition to that,
CouchDb is used to save a huge amount of
transactions, and considered the most suitable
choice to reduce data redundancy problem, and
produces separate storage for every single node in
BC network. Moreover, using CouchDB allows
developers to deploy indexes with their chain code
to make queries more efficient and enable them to
query huge datasets.
3.6 Transactions Flow
This section describes the general
transactional flow of the proposed system. First,
the user or client initiates transaction by creating a
transaction proposal for registration via SDK to
generate a digital certificate. The certificate holds
a public key and an entity (a hostname address)
signed by a certificate authority like Comodo,
GeoTrust. After the registration process is
completed any stakeholder can propose a
transaction using the generated certificate. The
transaction is approved by the endorsing peer and
then the peer returns the RW sets to the SDK. The
RW sets send to the orderer in order to create a
block after arranging the transactions. Finally, the
blocks are sent to the validator for verification and
then the peer executes the transaction, adds it to
the ledger and notifies the user of the result as
shown in figure 6.
Figure 6: The transactions flow.

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3.7 Methodology Flow
This research concentrates on enhancing the
working environment of the medical sector, which
influences reducing fraud of Tax evasion, reducing
the number of deaths caused by these counterfeit
medicines. Blockchain technology will help us by
adding traceability and visibility to drugs supply
and overcome the issue of counterfeiting. The
main goal of the research is to protect the health of
each person by taking advantage of the technical
characteristics of Blockchain as Immutability and
decentralized.
1. Study and summarize Blockchain solutions that
have been proposed previously to reduce
counterfeiting on drugs, and indicate the
strengths, weaknesses, and technologies in each
proposal.
2. Describe the system stakeholders and study
each entity's role with it is duties and the
information that is of importance to the system
and can be provided by this stakeholder. Then
connect each stakeholder with it is related
transactions.
3. Explain the importance of Blockchain as a
solution for decreasing counterfeiting drugs
and the suitable type that serves the problem at
hand taking into reflection the nature of the
environment.
4. Suggest a new framework and implement it
with a suitable consensus mechanism along
with the validation that must take place to
create a comprehensive, secure, and trusted
solution that meets the needs of the drugs
industry.
5. Use a unique consensus algorithm that
improves security.
6. Conclude the results of the experiment to
evaluate the proposed system criteria.
4. SIMULATION AND RESULTS
In this section, the simulation results of the
proposed system are discussed in detail.
1. Simulation Environment
The proposed system was implemented using
Node JS 14.17.3 programming language with
Microsoft Visual Studio Code 2019 16.0 software
for user interface via React JS, WebStrom 3.5 for
NodeJS, Postman 8.1.0 plus Swagger 2.0 for API
Services manipulations, Wireshark 3.4.7 and
SolarWinds (NPM) 12.4 for network performance
analyzing. The experiments were conducted on HP
laptop running Ubuntu 18.04 with core I7 10G, 16
GB RAM, 64-bit operating system, and X64-based
processor. The proposed system used a specialized
dataset for medicines provided by Kaggle, this
dataset is called "drugsComTest_raw". The dataset
contains 53,767 rows.
2. Results and Discussion
In this section, the overall performance of the
proposed system is given. The system is tested and
evaluated according to transaction latency,
transaction endorsement time, transaction
arrangement time Figure 8, 9 and validation and
addition transaction time Figure 10.
4.2.1 Transaction Latency
Transaction latency defines the number of
messages needed for a network to reach an
agreement to add a block to BC system. The
network traffic performance and the number of
messages needed for a network to reach an
agreement to add a block to BC system were tested
using special software called Wireshark 3.4.7
(software monitors network traffic) is shown in
figure 7. More messages mean that the process is
slower than the other one. The system transactions
is sent by Postman software to be recorded on
Wireshark software. The committing phase starts
after completing the endorsement and arrangement
of transactions, by passing two messages (unique
then verification) through all peers using the
functions “CheckThenAppend”,
“SendUniqueMsg” and “SendVerfiedMsg”. Only
one peer node sends a validation request to all
other peers in the network using
“CheckThenAppend” function. Then the network
peers verify the block and send unique messages to
other peers to indicate that the verification has
been done successfully using the method
“SendUniqueMsg”. The peers send a verification
message when receiving 75% unique messages
from network peers using the method
“SendVerfiedMsg”.
The final agreement is reached by exchanging
several messages between the peers using three
main methods “CheckThenAppend”,
“SendUniqueMsg” and “SendVerfiedMsg” , where
the number of messages is 2N*(N-1), where N is
the number of peers.

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© 2022 Little Lion Scientific
ISSN: 1992-8645 www.jatit.org E-ISSN: 1817-3195
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Figure 7: The number of messages to Reach Common
Agreement for 4 Nodes and 15 Nodes.
4.2.2 Transaction Endorsement Time
Transaction endorsement time is the time
required to invoke the smart contract and obtain
the permission and confidential information of a
client to enter the system as shown in figure 8. The
results in figure 8 shows that the required time is
too small, which indicates the efficiency of the
proposed system.
Figure 8: Transaction Endorsement Time.
4.2.3 Transaction Arrangement Time
Transaction arrangement time is the time
needed to take the scattered transactions from the
previous phase and add them into a queue for
arrangement as shown in figure 9. Figure 9 shows
that the process of arrangement is fast, which
increase the efficiency of the system.
Figure 9: Transaction Arrangement Time.
4.2.4 Validation Time
The validation time of transactions has a great
impact on the performance of the system. Figure
10 shows the validation time with different
number of transactions. The results show in figure
10 represents the time required to validate blocks
of different size. It is better to limit the number of
transactions per block to an average number,
because it affects the throughput of the system in
terms of the number of transactions that are
completed per time unit. Therefore, in the
proposed system the size of the block were
assumed to be 1000 transactions per each block.
Figure 10: Validation and Addition Transaction Time.
4.2.5 Security and Privacy Analysis
This section tests our system versus security
risks. We examine the system in terms of
confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA).
Confidentiality and Privacy
Our proposed system used X509 certificate-based
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for network peers

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and Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDS) that
generate a unique ID per transaction, this helps
protect network nodes from not revealing their true
identity to anyone in the system in any transaction.
No one can retrieve drug information except in the
case of obtaining a special drugID and a QR code
that consisting of three fields: the name of the
drug, the drug code, and an auto-generated
number, this QR must be scanned over the drug
packet, this will add another privacy level because
not everyone has access to the drug QR code. The
data is hashed and the access for confidential
transaction kinds is allowed only for stakeholders
that have permission.
Integrity
Every block includes a hash of it is content to
guarantee integrity. In addition, every transaction
list data also includes a hash of it is content to
ensure it hasn’t been altered. As we implement
hashing techniques any difference in the block
content will rescind the block then network
validators will drop the block without adding it to
the Blockchain. We imported the object-hash
library in NodeJS and utilized the method
"crypto.createHash (SHA256)" to hash the block
content and then add the hash value to the block,
most of the previous research did not specify the
type of hashing algorithm, but a few reported that
SHA256 is used. We imported "jsrsasign" library
in NodeJS for signature keys and utilized the
“crypto" method, the method
“crypto.generateKeyPair ("EC")” to create the
public key pair for the node. We used "ecdsa-
secp256k1" to produce the signature scheme
instance from "secp256k_pkcs8Scheme.
Availability
In general, the Blockchain system is distributed
and decentralized, so if any node is crashed, the
system will resume the job and serve the clients,
also there is a distributed ledger for each node in
the system. Our system is applying all rules of the
Blockchain so the data will be available at any
time.
4.2.6 Comparison between our Proposed
System and other System
We have made several comparisons
between our proposed system and some other
systems in the same field.
Author Difference between the previous proposal and
our system
[25]
The system proposed in this research is based
on Ethereum, unlike our system; there is still a
need for a third party in their system because
the smart contract is not programmed. Their
system is still the traditional way of controlling
from one side, and this does not explain the
meaning of Blockchain technology
.
[7]
In this work, the researchers designed a
framework to solve the problem, but the work
was not programmed, meaning there are no
reliable results as we have. The role of the main
consumer was not addressed in their system,
unlike our system, which clarified the roles of
all stakeholders and the elements of the
Blockchain in detail.
[16]
They did not consider the degree of safety, but
our system is based on the verification of the ID
and QR code of medicines. The data here is
collected by IoT sensors without regard to the
roles of stakeholders in the system. Also, their
system is a proposed theoretical system that has
not been programmed and there are no real
results.
[8]
The authors did not specify the characteristics
of their system, nor the types of transactions
that can be executed, or even the information of
the validators, unlike our system, which
explained all this. They programmed their
system using Hyper Ledger, but the system has
scalability issues.
[26]
.
They did not provide a transaction that returns
the full history of a particular drug, unlike our
system that tracks the drug from the
manufacturing stage to the customer's arrival.
They did not clarify the type and details of the
modification algorithm, how it will work with
the system, and what the validators are for.
Finally, this system penetrates the features of
the Blockchain because it is implemented from
one side.
5. CONCLUSION
In this paper we proposed a BC-based system
for preventing drug Counterfeit. Due to the fact
that the proposed system used X509 certificate-
based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for network
peers and Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDS)
that generate a unique ID per each transaction, the
experiments demonstrate the usability and
efficiency of the implemented system in terms of
confidentiality, data integrity, privacy, and
privacy of data. Moreover, the results show that to
reach a consensus in a system of N peers, 2N*(N-
1) messages are required. In addition, the proposed
system has high performance in terms of less time
needed to validate and append transactions into
blocks.

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Annex-1

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15th March 2022. Vol.100. No 5
© 2022 Little Lion Scientific
ISSN: 1992-8645 www.jatit.org E-ISSN: 1817-3195
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Figure 5: The Proposed Consensus Algorithm