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 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.