A systematic survey on security and privacy issues of medicine supply chain: Taxonomy, framework, and research challenges

Abstract

AbstractSeveral decades ago, the medicine supply chain (MSC) transferred the medicines from the manufacturer to the end‐consumer and kept all records in a manual register. The manual intermediary management of MSC and medicine data often leads to issues like unauthorized third parties participating in the process and illegally tempering medicine data. As a result of this medicine temperament, end users get counterfeit medicine that poses severe consequences for patients' health. Over time, manual data management and intermediaries transform into digital platforms that track, manage, and exchange data in real‐time. Real‐time data exchange opens attackers up to target MSCs, access medicine data illegally, and modify medicine conditions, locations, and specifications. With the objective of this, the proposed survey identifies security and privacy issues and discusses security solutions. This security solution involves various data security and privacy frameworks such as micro‐segmentation, zero trust model, and many other software‐based security solutions. Moreover, The proposed survey explores radio frequency identification for medicine tracking in which each intermediary transforms the medicine location over the internet. In contrast, the Internet of Things is used to exchange medicine temperature conditions in real‐time. Furthermore, cybersecurity‐based solutions help protect against malicious threats, and blockchain keeps data private and temper‐proof. Artificial intelligence provides machine learning and deep learning models for analyzing large amounts of data to generate insights from the MSC data. Therefore, this survey addresses the various security and privacy issues and provides solutions that help researchers carry out work in this domain.