CovidBChain: Framework for access‐control, authentication, and integrity of Covid‐19 data

Abstract

In the Covid-19 pandemic, information about the medical equipment such as personal protective equipment, ventilators, testing kits, oxygen cylinders, ICU beds, and patient diagnostic status is a black box for the patients. This article proposes a blockchain-assisted Covid-19 big data chain (CovidBChain) framework to handle the Covid-19 data, which is of colossal size (volume), coming from different sources (variety) and generated at every time instance (velocity). CovidBChain is proposed to protect electronic health records and Covid-19 equipment's information from illegal modification. CovidBChain provides transparency, access control, and integrity to Covid-19 data. The status of critical equipment like ventilator, Covid-19 beds, oxygen cylinder, and ICU status each such operation is integrated into the CovidBChain as a transaction. A prototype has been simulated using Ganache, Metamask, InterPlanetary File System, and Reactjs. The comparative assessment using proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-authority (PoA) deduces that the upload and retrieval time in PoA is less than PoW, while the transaction cost is more in PoW. The overhead of message exchange communication is reduced by a factor of 4.3× in PoA as compared to the PoW approach. CovidBChain has been tested on the Ethereum official test network Ropsten for PoW and Goerli for PoA.

Mobile Smart Contracts: Exploring Scalability Challenges and Consensus Mechanisms

“…Based on the results and insights into the features and limits of each available sharding approach, a comprehensive comparison is provided. Scalability is a major barrier to adopting blockchain in real-world applications [87]. Scalability issues are addressed by Xie et al [88] and Hafid et al [89] from the perspectives of throughput, storage, and networking.…”

“…patient records and other health information. The potential for complete mobile health applications that use blockchain to enhance data security, privacy, and interoperability is possible if this can be done at scale [87]. These and other applications can be made more useful and efficient by increasing the scalability of blockchain systems on mobile devices.…”