PRESCRIPTION AUTHENTICATION USING SPECKLE PATTERNS

摘要

The invention relates to a system (100) for verifying the authenticity of medicament entitlement tokens, such as prescriptions (102), used to control the dispensing of medicaments. The system comprises a network (104) connecting at least one token provider terminal (106), a system server (120) and a verification terminal (130). The token provider terminal 106 is operable to provide a signature from a speckle pattern derived from a medicament entitlement token that can be stored by the server system (120). The verification terminal (130) can then be operated remotely to recreate the signature in order to verify the authenticity of the medicament entitlement token by comparing it to stored signatures. The system (100) relies upon the intrinsic physical properties of the medicament entitlement token to generate a unique signature for each token that is produced. This makes the medicament entitlement tokens themselves very difficult to forge. Moreover, the signatures transmitted over the network do not need to contain any details relating to the content of the medicament entitlement tokens, such as patient data, hence signature data stored by the system can be made privacy neutral so that even if it were to be intercepted or copied this would not compromise confidentiality.