Blockchain Meets COVID-19: A Framework for Contact Information Sharing and Risk Notification System

Abstract

COVID-19 causes a global epidemic infection, which is the most severe infection disaster in human history. In the absence of particular medication and vaccines, tracing and isolating the source of infection is the best option to slow the spread of the virus and reduce infection and death rates among the population. There are three main obstacles in the process of tracing the infection: 1) Patient's electronic health record is stored in a traditional centralized database that could be stolen and tampered with the infection data, 2) The confidential personal identity of the infected user may be revealed to a third party or organization, 3) Existing infection tracing systems [1] [2] do not trace infections from multiple dimensions. Either the system is location-based or individual-based tracing. In this work, we propose a global COVID-19 information sharing system that utilizes the Blockchain, Smart Contract, and Bluetooth technologies. The proposed system unifies location-based and Bluetoothbased contact tracing services into the Blockchain platform, where the automatically executed smart contracts are deployed so that users can get consistent and non-tamperable virus trails. The anonymous functionality provided by the Blockchain and Bluetooth technology protects the user's identity privacy. With our proposed analysis formula for estimating the probability of infection, users can take measures to protect themselves in advance. We also implement a prototype system to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.

Blockchain Based Real-Time Contact Tracing – A Secure Way to Mitigate Highly Infectious Diseases

“…A study by Song et al (2020) addresses concerns regarding privacy security systems when understanding how centralized data systems can violate users' privacy when collecting data revolving around COVID-19 cases. Many companies like Apple and Google are using centralized data systems by storing user information in a cloud system which eventually leads the user to lose access to their data while making it easier for hackers to gain control of the confidential information.…”

“…can be leveraged to address this crucial contact tracing problem. Recently, several contact-tracing mobile applications have been developed using Bluetooth-embedded technology (Song et al, 2020). Using such technology, it is possible to record close encounters between mobile phones, wearables, and IoT devices.…”

“…Personal information sharing even in case of a pandemic situation such as COVID-19 is governed by the policies of the federal and state government. Current work from MIT, Apple, and Google have announced their tracking solutions by storing users' data in the cloud (Song et al, 2020), whereby the user may lose ownership of their data.…”

A Decentralized Solution for Epidemiological Surveillance in Campus Scenarios

“…An interesting proposal by Song et al [29] exploits the blockchain as a trustless repository to store location-based and individual-based information for both direct and indirect contact tracing, as well as for risk contagion assessment, to be further processed by the central server. This heavy data burden on the blockchain affects the performance and the scalability of the whole system.…”

Privacy-Preserving Infection Exposure Notification without Trust in Third Parties

“…[7] proposes a potential intervention to privacy with regard to promotion of public health. [24] proposes to track users' travel trajectories.…”