COVID-19 Contact Tracing Using Blockchain

• Main Authors: Haya R. Hasan, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Ibrar Yaqoob, Mohammed Omar, Samer Ellahham
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: COVID-19; blockchain; Ethereum smart contracts; transparency; security analysis; contact tracing
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9410295/

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.