COVERT-Blockchain: Privacy-Aware Contact Tracing for COVID-19 on a Distributed Ledger
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Khan, Junaid Ahmed; Bangalore, Kavyashree Umesh; Ozbay, Kaan
- Source
- 2021 3rd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS) Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS), 2021 3rd Conference on. :31-32 Sep, 2021
- Subject
- Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
COVID-19
Data privacy
Privacy
Distributed ledger
Scalability
Robustness
Trajectory
Blockchain
Privacy preservation
Contact tracing
- Language
Privacy preservation in contact tracing for COVID-19 is challenging as such applications tend to reveal users sensitive data which is shared together with their location. This paper proposes COVERT-Blockchain, a novel distributed ledger based platform for contact tracing without revealing users privacy where infected users only share their anonymized location traces on the Blockchain with a sliding window. To further reduce the chances of revealing the corresponding users' trajectories, in COVERT-Blockchain we employ an adaptive logging mechanism to store trajectory data for contact tracing only if the users stayed in a location for longer time duration. COVERT-Blockchain is evaluated for scalability and robustness in terms of overhead and delays in storing and retrieving data, results show it to be efficiently achieving contact tracing without privacy leakage.