  Counterfeit products cause severe harm to public safety and health by
penetrating untrusted supply chains. Numerous anti-counterfeiting techniques
have been proposed, among which the use of inherent, unclonable irregularities
of paper surfaces has shown considerable potential as a high-performance
economical solution. Prior works do not consider supply chains cohesively,
either focusing on creating or improving unclonable identifiers or on securing
digital records of products. This work aims to systematically unify these two
separate but connected research areas by comprehensively analyzing the needs of
supply chains. We construct a generalized paper-based authentication framework
and identify important shortcomings and promising ideas in the existing
literature. Next, we do a stage-wise security analysis of our consolidated
framework by drawing inspiration from works in signal processing, cryptography,
and biometric systems. Finally, we examine key representative scenarios that
illustrate the range of practical and technical challenges in real-world supply
chains, and we outline the best practices to guide future research.
