Separate but complementary European supply chain pilots have demonstrated on-package anti-counterfeiting and secure product authentication. The effort by UK counterfeit-fighting syndicate SecureTrace involved the anti-counterfeiting of drug packages.
A commercial-scale high-speed packaging line for blister-packed tablets was outfitted to apply both a serialized code to each package using a security-enhanced ink and an optical fingerprint on a selected surface.
The other effort was a coding project, run by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries Association. Drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies in Sweden, working with 110,000 drug packages tagged with EAN 128 linear barcodes and ECC200 2D data matrix codes, achieved a 99 percent confirmation-completion rate. Most confirmations took one second or less. The product authentication process began with a package scan, followed by communication of scan data with a central database, and then returns confirmation.
- here's the article