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Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Infection Control System for Covid-19-Like Pandemics Using Blockchain | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Infection Control System for Covid-19-Like Pandemics Using Blockchain


Abstract:

Contact tracing is a very effective way to control the COVID-19-like pandemics. It aims to identify individuals who closely contacted an infected person during the incuba...Show More

Abstract:

Contact tracing is a very effective way to control the COVID-19-like pandemics. It aims to identify individuals who closely contacted an infected person during the incubation period of the virus and notify them to quarantine. However, the existing systems suffer from privacy, security, and efficiency issues. To address these limitations, in this article, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving Blockchain-based infection control system. Instead of depending on a single authority to run the system, a group of health authorities, that form a consortium Blockchain, run our system. Using Blockchain technology not only secures our system against single point of failure and denial of service attacks, but also brings transparency because all transactions can be validated by different parties. Although contact tracing is important, it is not enough to effectively control an infection. Thus, unlike most of the existing systems that focus only on contact tracing, our system consists of three integrated subsystems, including contact tracing, public places access control, and safe-places recommendation. The access control subsystem prevents infected people from visiting public places to prevent spreading the virus, and the recommendation subsystem categorizes zones based on the infection level so that people can avoid visiting contaminated zones. Our analysis demonstrates that our system is secure and preserves the privacy of the users against identification, social graph disclosure, and tracking attacks, while thwarting false reporting (or panic) attacks. Moreover, our extensive performance evaluations demonstrate the scalability of our system (which is desirable in pandemics) due to its low communication, computation, and storage overheads.
Published in: IEEE Internet of Things Journal ( Volume: 9, Issue: 4, 15 February 2022)
Page(s): 2744 - 2760
Date of Publication: 25 June 2021

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I. Introduction

COVID-19 virus has spread quickly to all countries in the world causing a large number of infected people and deaths. By January 2021, the number of infected cases worldwide has reached 86+ million cases, and the number of deaths is around 2 million [1]. The devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on health, society, and world economy exceeded any other crisis since World War II, as the Secretary-General of the United Nations announced. For the impact on the healthcare sector, COVID-19 patients overwhelmed the hospitals and doctors had to make tough life and death decisions in some countries [2]. For the impact on society, the panic and the lockdown caused by COVID-19 outbreak resulted in adverse mental health consequences and common psychological reactions, such as anxiety, depression, stress, and lack of sleep [3]. For the impact on the economy, COVID-19 disrupted many industries and sectors due to sickening workers and the restrictive measures imposed by the governments on the travel and the gathering of the people [4]. For instance, the travel industry and tourism suffered from hefty losses because many countries suspended all air flights and closed their airports. The aviation industry lost 113 billion dollars in total [4].

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