DrugSure: A Blockchain-Based Framework for Secure Medicine Authentication and Anti-Counterfeit Drug Verification

Abstract

Counterfeit and low-quality drugs are a serious concern for public health, especially in developing and low- to middle-income nations. Lack of transparency, centralized control, and poor traceability systems in the traditional pharmaceutical supply chain create opportunities for counterfeit drugs to enter the market. The existing technology using barcodes and centralized databases has been prone to weaknesses like tampering, duplication, and a lack of public trust. Recently, blockchain technology has received considerable attention as a promising approach for secure drug validation because of its decentralized, immutable, and transparent properties. This survey paper examines and discusses the existing blockchain solutions for medicine authentication and anti-counterfeit drug verification. Different system designs, such as fully on-chain, hybrid on-chain/off-chain, permissioned, and public blockchain designs, have been considered. The paper also points out the important issues of scalability, cost, privacy, and usability, and the research gaps and future work for designing efficient and user-friendly medicine validation systems.

Introduction

The pharmaceutical supply chain is critical to global healthcare but is increasingly threatened by counterfeit and substandard medicines, particularly in developing countries such as India. Counterfeit drugs pose serious health risks, cause economic losses, and erode public trust. A key reason for their proliferation is the lack of secure, transparent, and auditable drug authentication systems. Traditional methods like barcodes, QR codes, and centralized databases are vulnerable to manipulation, duplication, and do not support independent, real-time verification by consumers.

Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution due to its decentralization, immutability, and transparency, which can enhance drug traceability and trust across the supply chain. The paper surveys existing blockchain-based medicine validation systems, examining their architectures, strengths, limitations, and implementation challenges. It explains foundational concepts such as counterfeit medicines, pharmaceutical supply chains, blockchain technology, and smart contracts, which automate registration, ownership transfer, and authenticity verification.

The literature review shows that blockchain-based approaches improve transparency and traceability but face unresolved challenges, including scalability, high transaction costs, data privacy concerns, limited real-world validation, and insufficient consumer-level usability. Hybrid blockchain architectures that combine on-chain verification with off-chain storage have shown promise but still lack comprehensive performance and privacy evaluations.

The paper identifies major open issues—scalability, cost efficiency, and balancing transparency with data privacy—and compares centralized, pure blockchain, and hybrid approaches. It highlights key research gaps such as the absence of cost-effective large-scale solutions, limited mobile and consumer-friendly verification mechanisms, weak regulatory integration, and insufficient real-time performance analysis.

Finally, the paper motivates a conceptual hybrid solution, DrugSure, which aims to combine blockchain security with off-chain storage and mobile accessibility. This approach seeks to enable real-time, consumer-level drug verification while maintaining privacy, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, addressing the limitations of existing medicine validation systems.

Conclusion

The problem of counterfeit medications has become a global issue that requires sophisticated technological solutions. This paper introduced DrugSure, a blockchain-based framework for validating medications that aims to revitalize trust in the pharmaceutical chain. The proposed solution utilizes a hybrid approach that combines the security of blockchain with the performance benefits of centralized cloud storage. Analysis shows that DrugSure overcomes the high costs and scalability issues of blockchain-based systems by using the Polygon Layer-2 network. This makes DrugSure a cost-effective, user-friendly, and transparent system that allows patients to check the authenticity of their medicines instantly. Future upgrades will include the integration of IoT sensors for cold chain monitoring (temperature tracking for vaccines) and the use of machine learning algorithms to automatically identify anomalies in the supply chain. These upgrades will work to further enhance the reliability and efficiency of the pharmaceutical verification process.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Pratik B. Khemnar, Sachin D. Khedkar, Vaibhav S. Lokhande, Pranav S. Garud, Prof. Satish Yedge. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.