Explainable AI (XAI)-Based Security Verification in Blockchain-Enabled Drug Supply Chains
Muammar Shahrear Famous1,2, Samia Sayed1,2, Rashed Mazumder1, Risala T. Khan1, M. Shamim Kaiser1, Mohammad Shahadat Hossain3, Karl Andersson4,*
1 Institute of Information Technology (IIT), Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Bangladesh
2 Department of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Data Processing, THM University of Applied Sciences, Friedberg, Germany
3 Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Chittagong, Chattogram, Bangladesh
4 Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, Skellefteå, Sweden
* Corresponding Author: Karl Andersson. Email: 
(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Advanced Security and Privacy for Future Mobile Internet and Convergence Applications: A Computer Modeling Approach)
Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2026.084699
Received 28 April 2026; Accepted 02 July 2026; Published online 14 September 2026
Abstract
Counterfeit pharmaceuticals, fragmented data management, and the absence of transparent verification mechanisms continue to threaten the integrity of modern healthcare drug supply chains. Although blockchain-based traceability frameworks improve decentralization and auditability, existing approaches frequently lack formally verified authentication guarantees and interpretable security decision mechanisms. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a unified blockchain-enabled healthcare supply-chain framework integrating nonce-based cryptographic authentication, formal security verification, Solidity smart contracts, and SHAP-based explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). The proposed protocol employs elliptic-curve digital signatures, nonce-based challenge–response authentication, and blockchain validation mechanisms to ensure secure communication among manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies, and regulatory authorities. Formal verification using ProVerif under the Dolev–Yao adversarial model confirms secrecy, authentication, integrity, and replay-attack resistance properties, with no executable attack traces detected. A permissioned Ethereum test network and Python-based cryptographic simulation environment were implemented using Solidity, Web3.py, and Py-EVM to evaluate deployment feasibility. Additional deployment validation was performed through Ethereum Sepolia test-network execution and Mythril smart-contract security auditing. Experimental results demonstrate stable and scalable operational performance, achieving average transaction latency below 3 s, throughput performance comparable to recent healthcare blockchain systems reporting approximately 95–155 transactions per second, and average cryptographic signing time of 0.71 ms per transaction. Gas-consumption analysis reported a mean transaction cost of 182,345 gas units with low execution variance, while storage overhead exhibited near-linear scalability as transaction volume increased. Additional adversarial evaluation demonstrated resilient transaction-validation behavior under varying node participation and simulated communication disruptions. To improve interpretability and regulatory transparency, the framework integrates SHAP-based explainable verification capable of identifying the relative influence of signature validity, nonce freshness, blockchain confirmation, and integrity verification on transaction acceptance decisions. Ablation analysis additionally showed that the complete integrated framework achieved 96.8% security assurance, 94.5% interpretability, and 97.2% traceability performance, substantially outperforming partial configurations lacking blockchain, formal verification, or explainability modules. The principal contribution of this work lies in combining formally verified authentication, blockchain-enabled traceability, explainable security analytics, and deployment-oriented validation within a unified pharmaceutical supply-chain architecture suitable for secure, scalable, and regulation-aware healthcare environments.
Keywords
XAI; blockchain; HSCM; cryptographic protocol design; formal security verification; smart contracts; replay attack detection; pharmaceutical traceability; explainable security; blockchain auditability
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