Abstract
Distribution and delivery of Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines have become challenging after their emergence. Today’s platforms and systems leveraged for managing data related to COVID-19 vaccines’ distribution and delivery fall short in providing transparency, trackability and traceability, immutability, audit, and trust features. Also, they are vulnerable to the single point of failure problem due to centralization. Such limitations hindering the safe, secure, transparent, trustworthy, and reliable distribution and delivery process of COVID-19 vaccines. In this paper, we propose an Ethereum blockchain-based solution for managing data related to COVID-19 vaccines’ distribution and delivery. We develop smart contracts to automate the traceability of COVID-19 vaccines while ensuring data provenance, transparency, security, and accountability. We integrate the Ethereum blockchain with off-chain storage to manage non-critical and large-sized data. We present algorithms and discuss their full implementation, testing, and validation details. We evaluate the proposed solution by performing cost and security analysis as well as comparing it with the existing non-blockchain and blockchain-based solutions. Performance evaluation results reveal that the proposed solution is low-cost, and our smart contracts are secure enough against possible attacks and vulnerabilities. The smart contracts code along with testing scripts is made publicly available.
Highlights
In this paper, we have addressed important issues related to tracking, tracing, and monitoring of COVID-19 vaccines’ distribution and delivery
We proposed an Ethereum blockchain-based approach to enable the distribution and delivery process of COVID-19 vaccines in a manner that is decentralized, traceable, transparent, reliable, auditable, secure, and trustworthy
We developed smart contracts to automate the process of recording and logging events related to the COVID-19 vaccines’ distribution and delivery, thereby ensuring data provenance
Summary
Based on the aforementioned studies, we conclude that blockchain has shown immense potential in terms of tracking and tracing supply chains It can play a vital role in ensuring secure, trustable, traceable, transparent, and reliable delivery of COVID-19 vaccines. On-chain Storage: It is used to register actors, store logs, events generated by smart contracts, and record any violation that occurs during the delivery process of the COVID-19 vaccine smart containers which ensures reliability and provides real-time monitoring. The IoT-Enabled COVID-19 vaccine smart container communicates with the Ethereum blockchain to record violations and the cloud storage to record non-critical data and to provide live monitoring metrics that require large storage which would be very costly to store on the blockchain. The DApp users will be able to notice any violations through the Ethereum smart contract
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