Fake product identification for small and medium firms (FPISMF) using blockchain technology

Abstract

Counterfeit products have become a significant problem for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), with the estimated value of counterfeit goods worldwide reaching trillions of dollars. However, SMBs often lack the resources and technical expertise to implement sophisticated anti-counterfeiting measures. Towards this end, the work proposes a blockchain-based solution named as Fake Product Identification for Small and Medium Firms (FPISMF) using Hyperledger and AES encryption to enable SMBs to identify fake products and protect their brand reputation. The details of the products and the details of customers are encrypted using AES encryption and recorded on the blockchain. The application communicates with the blockchain network to validate the product and retrieve the details of the product. Chaincode is executed in a containerized environment, which provides isolation and security for the code and data being processed. An algorithm is also proposed to substitute the missing QR-code bits and data that helps reduce customer wait time. Experiments are conducted on synthesized data sets and results showing the effectiveness of the proposed FPISMF framework and reconciliation technique. It is observed from the results that though the time taken to replace a blurry bit is greatly reduced as compared to manual replacement of the product, there is an increase in this time when associated with encryption while extraction of the corresponding code from cloud database thereby achieving a time complexity of O(n), where ‘n’ is the number of scanned products. In addition, the AES SMB time complexity is approximately recoded as O(n/2) and the Cloud access and retrieval time is O(n) as compared to O(2n) in the existing work. This shows a significant improvement in the ability to replace missing bits and perform a secure analysis respectively.