JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused global disturbance by affecting more than forty-two million people (as of October end). Since there is no medication or vaccine available, the only way to combat it is to prevent it from spreading as much as possible. Digital contact tracing is an effective technique that can be utilized for this purpose, as it eliminates the manual contact tracing process and would help in identifying and isolating the affected people. However, the users are reluctant to share their location and contacts details because of the concerns related to the privacy and security of their personal information which affects its implementation and extensive adoption. The blockchain technology has been applied in various domains and has proven to be an effective approach for handling data transactions in secure manner, which makes it an ideal choice for digital contact tracing applications. The properties of blockchain such as time stamping and immutability of the data would help in getting the accurate information regarding the trail of the virus in a transparent manner, while cryptography of data assures the integrity of information being provided. Furthermore, the anonymity of the user identities alleviates some of the risks related to the privacy and confidentiality of the users. In this paper, we provide the users with the detailed discussion on the digital contact tracing mechanism and discusses about the applications developed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, we have presented the possible risks, issues and challenges associated with the available contact tracing applications and analyzed how the adoption of blockchain-based decentralized network for handling the application could provide the users with the privacy preserving contact tracing without compromising the performance efficiency.