Conclusion
In this paper, we discuss several blockchain- use cases for the COVID-19
pandemic. The paper focused on outbreak tracking to mitigate the spread
of falsified or modified data. Our proposed blockchain-based solution
promotes transparency, traceability and streamlines the communication
between stakeholders in the network. Moreover, it ensures data
immutability and security while simultaneously encourages the collection
of data from trusted sources. Integrating blockchain technology in
tracking solutions increases the reliability of trusted sources and
allows the public and healthcare officials to make sound judgements
based on the latest accurate web feeds available in the distributed
ledgers.
We proposed solution uses Ethereum smart contracts and oracles as
primary components. Our framework used smart contracts to execute
functions without intermediaries while using oracles to feed the
contract with real-time data as it acts as a gateway between the real
world and blockchain network. The developed system would update the
Dapps and dashboards with real-time statistics related to the number of
confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries. The presented system
architecture, sequence diagram and algorithms can be easily generalized
for tracking various other infectious diseases. Our solution addresses
the problems faced in the current pandemic crisis such as
miscommunication, data manipulation and single point of failure.
Furthermore, it mitigates malicious activities due to its inherent
cryptography security features. The smart contract code is made publicly
available in GitHub. The functions developed were tested in the Remix
environment to demonstrate the validity and operational aspects of the
smart contract as detailed in the algorithms.
We present a detailed cost analysis to compute the transaction costs
incurred when interacting with the smart contract. The results indicate
that a minimal cost of less than 1 USD is incurred when executing
transactions while the cost of deploying the contract was less than 4
USD. This demonstrates that the proposed solution is feasible and
cost-effective for all stakeholders. In addition, we present security
analysis pertaining to integrity, accountability, authorization,
non-repudiation and resilient to common forms of cyber-attacks including
DDoS attacks. For future work, we aim to expand the smart contract
functionalities and develop Dapps to enable participants to interact
with Ethereum smart contracts seamlessly.