Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many countries around the globe to put strict policies and measures in place in an attempt to control the rapid spread of the virus. These measures have affected economic activities and have impacted a broad range of businesses, such as international traveling, restaurants, and shopping malls. As COVID-19 vaccination efforts progress, countries are starting to relax international travel constraints and permit passengers from certain destinations to cross the border. Moreover, travelers from those destinations are likely required to provide certificates of vaccination results or negative COVID-19 tests before crossing the borders. Implementing these travel guidelines requires sharing information between countries, such as the number of COVID-19 cases and vaccination certificates for travelers. In this paper, we introduce SPIN, a framework leveraging a permissioned blockchain for sharing COVID-19 information between countries. This includes public data, such as the number of vaccinated people, and private data, such as vaccination certificates for individuals. Additionally, we employ cancelable fingerprint templates to authenticate private information about travelers. We analyze the framework from scalability, efficiency, security, and privacy perspectives. To validate our framework, we provide a prototype implementation using the Hyperledger Fabric platform.
Highlights
We introduce SPIN, a framework using a permissioned blockchain to share information, which is effective in combating COVID-19 spread across the globe
The SPIN framework enables the sharing of public data through a permissioned ledger, which is visible to all peers, and private data through private data collections, which are only visible to peers who are authorized to view them
To further illustrate the utility of our framework, the paper presents a series of simple statistics that can be computed from the public and private data that are supplied by the framework
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Personal private data, such as test and vaccine certificates of individuals traveling to specific countries, may only be shared with the travel destination countries to preserve privacy, i.e., without being pushed to the blockchain. This motivates our work in developing a framework for sharing both public and private health-related information between countries. A decentralized framework (SPIN) for sharing COVID-19 vaccination and test certificates as well as public health-related data.
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