Connect - Blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identity Empowered Contact Tracing Platform

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has resulted in increased fatality rates across the world and has stretched the resources in healthcare facilities. There have been several proposed efforts to contain the spread of the virus among humans. Some of these efforts involve appropriate social distancing in public places, monitoring and tracking temperature at the point of access, etc. In order for us to get back to the “new normal", there is a need for automated and efficient human contact tracing that would be non-intrusive and effective in containing the spread of the virus. In this paper, we have developed “Connect", a Blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) based digital contact tracing platform. “Connect" will provide an automated mechanism to notify people in their immediate proximity of an occurrence of a positive case and would reduce the rate at which the infection could spread. The platform’s self-sovereign identity capability will ensure no attribution to a user and the user will be empowered to share information. The ability to notify in a privacy-preserving fashion would provide businesses to put in place dynamic and localized data-driven mitigation response. “Connect’s" SSI based identity wallet platform encodes user’s digital identities and activity trace data on a permissioned blockchain platform and verified using SSI proofs. The user activities will provide information, such as places travelled, travel and dispatch updates from the airport etc. The activity trace records can be leveraged to identify suspected patients and notify the local community in real-time. Simulation results demonstrate transaction scalability and demonstrate the effectiveness of “Connect" in realizing data immutability and traceability. © 2021, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.