data. Furthermore, data stored on the blockchain is made available to
all members in the network ensuring transparency among participants.
Blockchain technology has several potential use cases that can help
tackle the current pandemic crisis. It can be used to simplify the
clinical trial processes for vaccines and drugs, raise public awareness,
transparently track donations and fundraising activities and act as a
reliable data tracker. In this paper, we focus on the data tracking use
case as blockchain enables confidentiality and trust to be maintained in
data collection and reporting. COVID-19 data may be collected from
numerous trusted sources such as WHO, the Center for Disease Control
(CDC), the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) etc. As a
result, building a decentralized tracking system that retrieves publicly
available information and data from authoritative sources to display on
decentralized applications and dashboards is vital as this platform
imposes security restrictions and data privacy.
It should be noted that building a blockchain platform to track COVID-19
transmission is essential as many of the currently developed systems are
prone to hacking and cybercriminals. Table 1 highlights the benefits of
implementing a blockchain-based solution over a traditional centralized
solution in various aspects including data handling, quality assurance,
fault tolerance etc.
For instance, the World Economic Forum highlighted that hackers are
using coronavirus maps to spread malware . These attackers impersonate
interactive maps that track the spread of the disease, by doing so, they
trick users into giving their sensitive information such as user names,
passwords, credit card numbers etc. The hackers then use this private
data to sell it on the deep web or financially exploit people. In
addition, some hackers use fraudulent mobile apps as fake coronavirus
tracker apps to trap users into paying a ransom to avoid leaking their
social media information . Furthermore, the public is continuously
exposed to misinformation and spams of fake news. Blockchain technology
can eliminate the problems faced by centralized data systems. It
introduces immutability and data provenance while removing single point
of failure in the system. Therefore, with blockchain data tracker any
user with Internet access can learn, in a few short clicks, real-time
information about the COVID-19 virus in a secure and trustable manner.
The primary objective of this paper is to propose a blockchain-based
solution that builds a trusted COVID-19 tracking system. The main
contributions of this paper are summarized as follows:
- We present an extensive survey on the various uses cases and
applications of blockchain technology specific to the COVID-19 crisis.
- We develop an Ethereum blockchain-based solution which validates and
tracks COVID-19 data on the network using Ethereum smart contracts and
oracles.
- We propose a framework along with the algorithms that define the
working principles of the proposed blockchain approach and provide a
detailed sequence diagram of the
blockchain-based tracking
system.
We validate and test various scenarios of the overall system
functionalities.
We present cost and security analysis of the proposed solution to show
the feasibility of implementing the proposed solution.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section II details
a brief background on the COVID-19 pandemic and explains the
significance of utilizing blockchain platforms in handling this
outbreak. Section III provides insights into how blockchain technology
can be used in various uses cases related to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Section IV details the system methodology and design architecture of the
proposed system while the implementation is discussed in Section V.
Section VI demonstrates the results of testing the proposed solution.
Furthermore, Section VII details the cost and security analysis of our
proposed solution and Section VIII presents the conclusions of our work.