Anti-Counterfeiting Based on Supply Chain Proximity

Despite the availability of several product authentication technologies, anti-counterfeiters still find difficulty in locating the suspicious items among the mostly genuine ones. We propose in this paper an approach that uses previously performed authenticity checks to determine the likelihood that the yet-unchecked items are authentic or fake. The approach is based on proximity of items in the supply chain, which can be deduced from Track and Trace data of RFID-tagged items. The paper discusses the algorithms used to calculate the fakeness probability of yet-unchecked items and gives the results of a simulation study that evaluates the algorithms' performance.