Block The Chain Software Weapons of Fighting Against COVID-19
Block The Chain Software Weapons of Fighting Against COVID-19
Block The Chain Software Weapons of Fighting Against COVID-19
R
esponding to the COVID-19 pandemic, smart scenarios include different health-care institutions,
applications1 have begun to be developed for various stakeholders within the supply chain, heteroge-
the prevention of virus spreading and the man- neous networks, and multicultural and highly distrib-
agement of related societal problems, such as uted and dynamic system entities.3
travel restrictions. The vast majority of these applica- There is a wide range of smart applications running in
tions are centralized and nonsmart, which makes them smart systems exploiting intelligent capabilities, relying
carry single-point-of-failure, privacy, high-latency, and on cloud, fog, and edge services.4 Those related to COVID
legal issues along with a lack of efficient handling of include contact tracing (for example, VirusRadar, Stopp
mobile devices.2 Additionally, challenges in real-life Corona, and StopCOVID) and social distancing applica-
tions5 to monitor and contribute to slowing the virus’s
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MC.2022.3147368
spread and the number of infections. After the successful
Date of current version: 18 July 2022 development and testing of COVID-19 vaccines, another
T hi s wo r k i s lice n s e d u n d e r a
C reat i ve Co m m o n s At t r ib u t io n 4.0 L ice n s e. Fo r m o re i n fo r mat io n ,
s e e h t t ps : //c reat i ve co m m o n s .o rg /lice n s es / by/4.0/d e e d . a s t. PUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER SOCIET Y SEPTEMBER 2022 43
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group of applications has arisen for privacy-aware, scalable, and interoper- a coupled geodata cypher to track loca-
managing immunity passports and able solution for effective vaccination tions. Its authors argued that publicly
vaccination certificates (for instance, information management. The arti- sharing user pseudonyms generated by
International Air Travel Associa- cle derives three scenarios from real- private keys are safe. They showed that
tion Travel Pass and CommonPass). world vaccination reports and uses BeepTrace overcomes earlier related
The adoption and mass acceptance their requirements to evaluate the scal- solutions by using multiple positioning
of COVID-19-related applications are ability of various BC systems with the technologies with high security require-
greatly hindered by a general lack of Fog-Blockchain simulation environ- ments. Dai et al.12 proposed an approach
trust in the nature of tracing apps and ment (FoBSim) tool.15 The results can for using a BC-enabled Internet of Medi-
the reluctance of people to share their serve as recommendations for possible cal Things (IoMT). They claimed that the
personal data. To overcome this issue, implementations of the proposal, which IoMT can contribute to origin tracing
we need to revise current solutions and could contribute to a better and more and more efficient social distancing and
design methods addressing privacy efficient fight against COVID-19. The quarantine management. In their work,
awareness and preservation, trust, following sections gather and compare they stated the requirements (smart
explainability, and interoperability.7 related works, then present a proposal hospitals, data provenance, and remote
Blockchain (BC)6 is a form of distrib- for a unified, BC-based solution to fight health care) for privacy-aware BC-based
uted ledger technology for applications COVID-19 and future pandemics. IoMT solutions. As open issues, they
such as digital cryptocurrencies and named BC scalability and trustworthy
digital smart contracts. Solutions inte- RELATED WORK artificial intelligence.
grated with BCs provide high levels of Applying BC technology to health care Biometric and identity manage-
security and trust and guarantee a fully has been studied by Kshetri.9 That ment companies, such as SCIPA, Mvine,
immutable transactional history with- work argues that such integration and iProov, announced trials of their
out the control of a central authority. can improve accountability and data COVID-19 immunity and vaccination
BC applications have been proposed in exchanges. Nevertheless, the manage- passports at the beginning of 2021.
various field, from e-health to the Inter- ment of detailed patient health records Meanwhile, European national efforts
net of Vehicles. The author believes that results in additional privacy issues. have been reported by the European
integrating BC technology with fog This article refrains from addressing Commission regarding mobile contact
computing (FC) to serve smart applica- management issues surrounding gen- tracing apps,1 and a European Union
tions to manage mobile device data can eral health-care records and focuses Digital COVID Certificate (EUDCC) ini-
enhance the privacy and security of cur- on COVID-related information. tiative has been launched.13 A central-
rent systems.8 This article envisions a Concerning the state of the art for uti- ized EUDCC gateway will be used to
solution for gathering, storing, validat- lizing FC and BCs to address challenges verify certificate signatures, and both
ing, and analyzing COVID-19-related related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the issuer and the certificates will have
data, including infections and vaccina- there are some related approaches. A digital signatures, and their data will
tions among citizens of a region. To real- priv acy-preserving mobile and fog be stored in the corresponding coun-
ize such a system, emerging technolo- computing framework 10 is an e-gov- tries. The EUDCC seems to be a good
gies are needed. This proposal builds ernment application framework for approach, but it enables only COVID-19
on BC technology to provide trust and tracing COVID-19 community transmis- vaccination information verification. It
transparency and on FC to support sion by utilizing mobile computing and is also a good step toward standardiza-
local, private data management and FC. The authors of this solution aimed to tion, but interoperability with non-EU
low-latency access to the system. enhance privacy and trust by enabling countries has not been achieved.
The main contribution of this article user control with minimal data collec- The author believes that citizen trust
is the general architecture for vaccina- tion, data destruction at will, and trans- and privacy could be further enhanced
tion information validation and track- parency through open source codes. with fog and BC integration, although
ing with a fog- and cloud-based BC sys- BeepTrace11 is a solution for BC-enabled, additional features would be needed
tem (VACFOB). This approach merges privacy-preserving COVID-19 contact to enable patient health tracking,
FC and BC technologies to provide a tracing. It stores user pseudonyms with pandemic monitoring, and increasing
SEPTEMBER 2022 45
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status change (for example, getting solution does not restrict the sys- Respiratory Syndrome, and flu vari-
vaccinated or recovering/receiving tem’s use to COVID-19; VACFOB can be ants). In the border control use case (as
a negative test result), and 3) a time used to handle other types of viruses/ shown at the bottom right of Figure 1),
stamp and location information (the vaccinations (such as Severe Acute an officer checks the personal ID of a
exact date and city). Note that this Respiratory Syndrome, Middle East citizen. He or she enters the ID into the
Cloud
Cloud Layer
Trusted Third Party
Block Information
ID Hash
Vaccination With
Status Change
Blockchain Miner Miner
Node 1 Node n City and Date
Fog Layer
Miner Miner
Node 2 Node 3
Fog Node
Extracted
Extracted ID Hash
Extracted Patient ID Hash Citizen
Certificates ID Hash Database and Database
Database and Information Response
Information
FIGURE 1. The proposed VACFOB architecture for COVID-19 vaccination verification and immunity analysis.
SEPTEMBER 2022 47
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›› Scenario 1: There are 100,000 a preset number of transactions per By determining the parameters to
daily transactions for COVID-19 block (TPB); and the applied consensus investigate certain BC infrastructures,
status updates for citizens. algorithm. By investigating different we made the following restrictions.
›› Scenario 2: There are 1 million parameter settings, we can analyze We varied the number of fog nodes and
daily transactions for COVID-19 how to meet the required TPS values. miners from 10 to 100 and the number
status updates for citizens. The FoBSim simulation experiments of miner neighbors from two to 10. Con-
›› Scenario 3: There are 10 million (see Table 2) using the PoA and PoS consen- cerning the block size in the BC system,
daily transactions for COVID-19 sus algorithms were locally performed Ethereum stores around 70 TPB, while
status updates for citizens. on an Intel i5-8265U CPU (eight cores, Bitcoin stores roughly 2,000 TPB, on aver-
3.8 GHz, and 12 GB of memory) running age; therefore, we decided to use 100- and
We assume that transactions are Windows 10. The PoW experiments were 1,000-TPB values for the experiments. To
performed during working hours (for conducted on an HP Synergy 480 Gen10 set the delay between neighbors in the
example, eight hours per day), so we server node with two Intel Xeon Gold fog layer, we used the WonderNetwork
can roughly estimate up to five trans- 5118 CPUs (2.3 GHz and 12 cores each) and (https://wondernetwork.com/pings) ser-
actions per second (TPS) for scenario 384 GB of memory, running Ubuntu vice. We counted network latency between
1, up to 50 TPS for scenario 2, and up 20.10. The number of transactions to big cities corresponding to the scenar-
to 500 TPS for scenario 3. A concrete be processed in all simulation runs was ios defined before [Hungary: Vienna,
BC infrastructure can be character- fixed at 10,000. Each simulation was Austria–Budapest, Hungary (7.4 ms);
ized by the number of fog nodes and performed five times, taking the aver- Germany: Munich–Amsterdam, The
miners in the system; the maintained age TPS value, as the individual ones Netherlands (15.2 ms); and Europe: War-
block size, which is proportional to marginally fluctuated. saw, Poland–Porto, Portugal (63.4 ms)].
Number of fog Number of Neighbors per Block size Delay between Consensus
Simulation nodes miners miner (TPB) neighbors (ms) algorithm TPS Target
SEPTEMBER 2022 49
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TABLE 4. The BC system analysis performance results with FoBSim using the PoS consensus algorithm.
Number of fog Number of Neighbors per Block size Delay between Consensus
Simulation nodes miners miner (TPB) neighbors algorithm TPS Target
TABLE 5. The BC system analysis performance results with FoBSim using the PoW consensus algorithm.
Number of fog Number of Neighbors per Block size Delay between Consensus
Simulation nodes miners minute (TPB) neighbors algorithm TPS Target
TP s,
TP s,
TP s,
TP s,
TP s,
tion results are available in in Tables 3,
0 de
0 de
0 de
0 de
0 de
0 de
B
B
00 o
00 o
10 No
00 o
10 No
10 No
1, g N
1, g N
1, g N
g
Fo
Fo
Fo
Fo
Fo
Fo
were covered by simulation runs com-
10
50
10
50
0
10
10
SEPTEMBER 2022 51
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Available: https://ec.europa.eu/info/
live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus
ABOUT THE AUTHOR -response/travel-during-coronavirus
-pandemic/mobile-contact-tracin
ATTILA KERTESZ is an associate professor in the Department of Software g-apps-eu-member-states_en
Engineering, University of Szeged, Szeged, 6720, Hungary, where he leads (Accessed: May 22, 2021).
the IoTCloud research group. His research interests include the federative 2. A. L. Phelan, “COVID-19 immunity
management of Blockchain, the Internet of Things, fog and cloud systems, passports and vaccination certif-
and interoperability issues of distributed systems in general. Kertesz received icates: Scientific, equitable, and
a Ph.D. from the Doctoral School of Computer Science, University of Szeged. legal challenges,” Lancet, vol. 395,
Contact him at [email protected]. no. 10237, pp. 1595–1598, 2020, doi:
10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31034-5.
3. P. K. Lahiri, R. Mandal, S. Banerjee,
and U. Biswas, “An approach towards
the performance of BCs using different provide privacy-aware, scalable, and developments of smart COVID-19
consensus algorithms for scenario 3. It interoperable vaccination information patient’s management and triaging
is clear that the PoW with difficulty management. It analyzed real-world vac- using blockchain framework,” Res.
levels 10 and 15 can provide the best cination reports and derived three scenar- Square, pp. 1–18, Sep. 9, 2020, doi:
performance for the applied settings ios as requirements, for which the perfor- 10.21203/rs.3.rs-70583/v1.
and requirements, but these variants mance of various BC infrastructures was 4. S. Varadi, G. Gultekin Varkonyi, and
can meet the target TPS only when analyzed by means of simulation. The A. Kertesz, “Legal issues of social IoT
1,000 TPB are applied. results can serve as recommendations for services: The effects of using clouds,
In summary, determining the num- possible implementations of VACFOB in fogs and AI,” in Toward Social Internet
ber of fog nodes and TPB to be stored in the near future. of Things (SIoT): Enabling Technolo-
the BC is crucial. For smaller-scale sys- gies, Architectures and Applications.
tems (for example, in scenario 1), it is ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Studies in Computational Intelligence,
possible to keep these numbers low, but The research leading to these results has vol. 846, A. Hassanien, R. Bhatnagar,
to cover a larger region, the number of received funding from the Trusted and N. Khalifa, and M. Taha, Eds. Cham:
fog nodes must inevitably be scaled up, reliable content on future blockchains Springer Nature Switzerland AG,
which implies that the TPB value needs (TruBlo) project of the European Union’s 2020, pp. 123–138.
to be raised, as well, to have the neces- Horizon 2020 research and innovation 5. P. Barsocchi et al., “COVID-19 & privacy:
sary performance. This systematic eval- program, under grant 957228, and from Enhancing of indoor localization archi-
uation can provide a general overview of the national project TKP2021-NVA-09, tectures towards effective social dis-
the behavior of BC-based systems, and implemented with support provided by tancing,” Array, vol. 9, p. 100,051, Mar.
in case of a possible implementation of the Ministry of Innovation and Tech- 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.array.2020.100051.
the VACFOB proposal, it can serve as a nology of Hungary, from the National 6. K. Yue et al., “A survey of decentralizing
guideline to ease parameter selection. Research, Development, and Innova- applications via blockchain: The 5G and
tion Fund, and from the University of beyond perspective,” IEEE Commun.
T
Szeged Open Access Fund under grant Surveys Tuts., vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 2191–2217,
he COVID-19 pandemic has spread 5612. We also thank Hamza Baniata for 2021, doi: 10.1109/COMST.2021.3115797.
around the world, changing every- his support in discussions and perform- 7. “Good health pass: A safe path to
body’s lives. Various smart appli- ing simulations with FoBSim. global reopening,” Good Health
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IEEE Symposium on
Security and Privacy