A hierarchical anti-counterfeit mechanism: Securing the supply chain using RFIDs

Abstract

Counterfeiting is a very serious threat to supply chain management systems. RFID systems are widely used to automate and speed up the process of remotely identifying products, however these systems are vulnerable to counterfeiting. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical anti-counterfeiting mechanism which uses a layered approach to identify dishonest middle parties involved in both counterfeiting and processing stolen/missing items. Our layered approach, which is designed for EPC Class-1 Gen-2 standard compliant tags, offers scalability and is suitable for different sizes of groups of tagged items. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.