Blockchain-enabled COVID-19 Contact Tracing Solutions

ABSTRACT

In light of the fast-spreading number of COVID-19 cases worldwide, contact tracing proved to be an effective measure to slow down the infection rate and mitigate the casualties caused by this virus. However, because of several concerns in terms of privacy, as well as security, several countries and their population around the globe are reluctant to adopt contact tracing solutions to contain the spread of the virus. Because of its distributed, public, and auditable nature, blockchain can be a groundbreaking solution contact tracing, given that it would provide a privacy-oriented contact tracing solution. Therefore, in this chapter, we discuss and compare the two alternatives proposed by the BeepTrace framework, active and passive, and also present some initial results based on an early implementation of it. As it can be seen, by utilizing blockchain together with contact tracing, user privacy, security, and decentralization can be guaranteed, giving back the trust needed for these applications to work. © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. All rights reserved.