Blockchain and Contact Tracing Applications for COVID-19: The Opportunity and The Challenges

Abstract

Contact tracing mobile applications have been emerging as potentially automating surveillance technology to help stem the spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) by tracking individuals and those they come into exposure with. The avalanche of these apps left the software security researchers' with concerns about vulnerabilities in hastily written software. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic has motivated the recent interest of leveraging blockchain for healthcare-related scenarios, including proposing and developing blockchain-based contact tracing apps. Utilizing the cryptographic concepts of blockchain to secure the collected data could help in winning the level of public engagement required to fight the spread of COVID-19. But will blockchain be a panacea to all the challenges accompanying these apps? Motivated by answering this question and following a twofold process, this paper: (i) explores the current landscape of contact tracing mobile apps, (ii) examines how blockchain technology can contribute positively to this landscape, and (iii) reports on the technical and social challenges that still accompany the deployment of blockchainbased contact tracing apps.

Recent Advances of Blockchain and Its Applications

“…Contact tracing as one of the most effective ways to defeat pandemic has been developed in many countries [201] . Contact tracing requires people to share their private contact history, sometimes even including sensitive information such as GPS coordinates or medical history [202,203] . Most initial attempts of blockchain-powered contact tracing approaches are of high level and treat blockchain naively as external storage or with no simulation provided to illustrate the effectiveness, such as BeepTrace [204] , Arifeen et al [205] , and Choudhury et al [206] Hasan et al [207] proposed to use blockchain to record participants' GPS coordinates and trigger proof of location to conduct contact tracing and risk alert.…”

“…Blockchain technology also helps COVID-19 vaccine control and management [202] . Considering fragile biological substances, which should be taken special care during transmission and distribution, Rotbi et al [213] discussed a concept of blockchain-enabled automatic vaccine lots management to promote the transparency and immutability of management data.…”

An analysis of the blockchain and COVID-19 research landscape using a bibliometric study

“…Blockchain's inherent features such as real-time exchange, cybersecurity, reliability and visibility, as well as transparency and traceability, make it the catapult for supply chain performance ( Aslam et al., 2021 ). Its efficiency gains have been demonstrated in supply chain redesign ( Nandi et al., 2021 ; Kouhizadeh et al., 2021 ), circular economy ( Upadhyay, 2021 ), the healthcare sector ( Idrees et al., 2021 ; Antal et al., 2021 ), the tourism sector ( Rashideh, 2020 ), the agri-food sector ( Feng et al., 2021 ), the energy sector ( Wang & Su, 2020 ), the construction sector (Perera et al., 2021), mobile contact location applications ( Kassab & Destefanis, 2021 ), Smart-cities applications ( Esposito et al., 2021 ), and the digital economy sector ( Idrees et al., 2021 ; Hasan et al., 2021 ).…”