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P2B-Trace: Privacy-Preserving Blockchain-based Contact Tracing to Combat Pandemics

Published: 18 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The eruption of a pandemic, such as COVID-19, can cause an unprecedented global crisis. Contact tracing, as a pillar of communicable disease control in public health for decades, has shown its effectiveness on pandemic control. Despite intensive research on contact tracing, existing schemes are vulnerable to attacks and can hardly simultaneously meet the requirements of data integrity and user privacy. The design of a privacy-preserving contact tracing framework to ensure the integrity of the tracing procedure has not been sufficiently studied and remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose P2B-Trace, a privacy-preserving contact tracing initiative based on blockchain. First, we design a decentralized architecture with blockchain to record an authenticated data structure of the user's contact records, which prevents the user from intentionally modifying his local records afterward. Second, we develop a zero-knowledge proximity verification scheme to further verify the user's proximity claim while protecting user privacy. We implement P2B-Trace and conduct experiments to evaluate the cost of privacy-preserving tracing integrity verification. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed system.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (3448016.3459237.mp4)
The eruption of COVID-19 has caused a unprecedented global crisis. Contact tracing, as a pillar of communicable disease control in public health for decades, has shows its effectiveness on COVID-19 control. Despite intensive research on contact tracing, existing schemes are vulnerable to attacks and can hardly simultaneously meet the requirements of data privacy and authenticity. The problem of designing a privacy-preserving contact tracing framework to ensure the authenticity of tracing procedure has not been sufficiently studied and remains open. In this paper, we propose BP$^2$-Trace, a privacy-preserving contact tracing initiative based on the blockchain system. First, a novel authenticated data structure is proposed for blockchain to prevent users' local contact data fraud with privacy concerns. Then, a zero-knowledge data authentication scheme is proposed based on the blockchain to verify the authenticity of local contact data, while preserving the patient's privacy. Finally, a decentralized contact detection scheme is designed to match close proximity and generate verifiable proofs without revealing the client's privacy. We implement BP$^2$-Trace and conduct extensive experiments by utilizing the popular blockchain framework. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed BP$^2$-Trace system.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGMOD '21: Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data
June 2021
2969 pages
ISBN:9781450383431
DOI:10.1145/3448016
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 18 June 2021

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Author Tags

  1. blockchain
  2. contact tracing
  3. integrity
  4. privacy-preserving

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Overall Acceptance Rate 785 of 4,003 submissions, 20%

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  • (2024)Do you need a blockchain in healthcare data sharing? A tertiary reviewExploration of Digital Health Technologies10.37349/edht.2024.00014(101-123)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
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