Lovely work. Here's a similar project where I showed that randomly-placed multicolored candy particles (nonpareils) can be used to confirm the authenticity of pharmaceuticals: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11234-4
I'm fairly certain that this cannot defend against a determined adversary buying up a bunch of pills, reading out the ids, and then reproducing the patterns (which would already be in the database) or similar enough patterns via a non-random process. Only useful for substitution attacks where someone trusts a pill because it is in a database without realizing that its contents could have been substituted for e.g. poison.
This may be obvious, but it also seems critical for any database that might use these to have expiration dates, otherwise expired pills could be bought in bulk and resold or have their codes reused.
Not something you hear often. =D
I know explosives are often laced with statistical chemical properties that identify them. I was wondering if that could be done to limit ammunition purchases as a way to get around gun control.
In addition to authentication, I imagine they could also be used to double-check expiration dates or as a last-ditch effort to notify consumers in the event of a recall. Being able to precisely identify exactly which factory and batch any given pill or other edible item came from could be very useful in some cases.
Something like Take RED ones in afternoon, Take the capsule in evening. Would be a pain for her if each one has a different color.
Set it up once a week and then just take the pills in the appropriate cell when the time is right. This also solves the problem of "did I already take my pills for today?".