Abstract
Several blockchain projects to help against COVID-19 are emerging at a fast pace, showing the potential of this disruptive technology to mitigate the multi-systemic threats the pandemic is posing on all phases of the emergency management and generate value for the economy and society as a whole. This survey investigates how blockchain technology can be useful in the scope of supporting health actions that can reduce the spread of COVID-19 infections and allow a return to normality. Since the prominent use of blockchains to mitigate COVID-19 consequences are in the area of contact tracing and vaccine/immunity passport support, the survey mainly focuses on these two classes of applications. The aim of the survey is to show that only a proper combination of blockchain technology with advanced cryptographic techniques can guarantee a secure and privacy preserving support to fight COVID-19. In particular, this article first presents these techniques, i.e. zero-knowledge, Diffie Hellman, blind signatures, and proxy re-encryption, then describes how they are used in combination with blockchains to define robust and privacy-preserving solutions. Finally, a brief description of blockchain applications beyond contact tracing and vaccine certification is presented.
Highlights
O N the 30th of January 2020, the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), an outbreak caused by the virus ’Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)’, was declared a Public Health Emergency of International concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) [1]
This study mainly focuses on a deep analysis of several blockchainbased approaches for contact tracing and for immune/vaccine certifications, analysing their strengths and weaknesses and how they can perform as effective tools to monitor and combat the spread and impact of the disease
BLOCKCHAIN FOR CONTACT TRACING Before presenting how blockchain technology can support and enhance contact tracing, we briefly summarize the main approaches for tracing contacts recently proposed to cope with the COVID-19 outbreak
Summary
O N the 30th of January 2020, the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), an outbreak caused by the virus ’Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)’, was declared a Public Health Emergency of International concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) [1]. This makes it urgently necessary to find proper technologies able to improve the level of security and privacy for these applications The aim of this survey is to investigate how blockchains, and, more in general, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) can be adopted in the scope of social and health measures aimed at reducing the spread of the COVID-19 infection to allow a return to "normality". To this aim, this study mainly focuses on a deep analysis of several blockchainbased approaches for contact tracing and for immune/vaccine certifications, analysing their strengths and weaknesses and how they can perform as effective tools to monitor and combat the spread and impact of the disease.
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