Abstract
Contact tracing has widely been adopted to control the spread of Coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19). It enables to identify, assess, and manage people who have been exposed to COVID-19, thereby preventing from its further transmission. Today’s most of the contact tracing approaches, tools, and solutions fall short in providing decentralized, transparent, traceable, immutable, auditable, secure, and trustworthy features. In this paper, we propose a decentralized blockchain-based COVID-19 contact tracing solution. Contact tracing can greatly suffice the need for a speedy response to a pandemic. We leverage the immutable and tamper-proof features of blockchain to enforce trust, accountability, and transparency. Trusted and registered oracles are used to bridge the gap between on-chain and off-chain data. With no third parties involved or centralized servers, the users’ medical information is not prone to invasion, hacking, or abuse. Each user is registered using their digital medical passports. To respect the privacy of the users, their locations are updated with a time delay of 20 minutes. Using Ethereum smart contracts, transactions are executed on-chain with emitted events and immutable logs. We present details of the implemented algorithms and their testing analysis. We evaluate the proposed approach using security, cost, and privacy parameters to show its effectiveness. The smart contracts code is publicly made available on GitHub.
Highlights
The year 2020 has witnessed the spread of Coronavirus2019 (COVID-19) all over the world
In this paper, we have proposed a decentralized blockchainbased contact tracing solution to mitigate the spread of COVID-19
We showcased how blockchain-based immutable logs can add trust, transparency, and accountability features into COVID-19 contact tracing applications
Summary
The year 2020 has witnessed the spread of Coronavirus2019 (COVID-19) all over the world. The advancements in technology can help in restoring human lives across the world. In efforts to mitigate the unprecedented spread of COVID-19, contact tracing applications have widely been developed [1]–[3]. Contact tracing applications are believed to be able to break the chain of COVID-19 infections [4]. Contact tracing or proximity tracing can be used to identify how close someone has been to other contacts regardless of the context and one of those people in contact is positive to the pandemic virus. Tracing back all the possible contacts to the positive case and informing them about the possibility of being infected is part
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