Lightweight Authentication Protocol for NFC Based Anti-Counterfeiting System in IoT Infrastructure

Counterfeit medications are known as the medications that were manufactured for the purpose of deceptively representing as authentic, effective and original in the market. Such medications cause severe health issues for patients. Counterfeited drugs have an inimical effect on the human health. The legal manufacturing companies also face threats to their revenue loss due to these counterfeited medicines. In this paper, we introduce a novel authentication protocol for anti-counterfeited drugs systems based on Internet of Things (IoT) to help checking the validity of drugs "unit dosage". Our protocol uses the near-field communication (NFC) as it is convenient for mobile environment. The protocol also offers reliable update phase for NFC. Furthermore, our scheme is complemented with performance evaluation along with the use of random oracle model for formal security analysis. We also evaluate our protocol broadly using Py-Charm tool. Results show that proposed protocol resists most of common related flaws almost in equal computing cost with more added security features.