TY - JOUR
T1 - COVID-19 Contact Tracing Using Blockchain
AU - Hasan, Haya R.
AU - Salah, Khaled
AU - Jayaraman, Raja
AU - Yaqoob, Ibrar
AU - Omar, Mohammed
AU - Ellahham, Samer
N1 - Funding Information:
This publication is based upon work supported by the Khalifa University of Science and Technology under Awards No. CIRA-2019-001 and RCII-2019-002, Center for Digital Supply Chain and Operations Management.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 IEEE.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - blockchain
KW - contact tracing
KW - COVID-19
KW - Ethereum smart contracts
KW - security analysis
KW - transparency
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85104594331&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3074753
DO - 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3074753
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85104594331
SN - 2169-3536
VL - 9
SP - 62956
EP - 62971
JO - IEEE Access
JF - IEEE Access
M1 - 9410295
ER -
