Anonymity Preserving IoT-Based COVID-19 and Other Infectious Disease Contact Tracing Model

Abstract

Automated digital contact tracing is effective and efficient, and one of the non-pharmaceutical complementary approaches to mitigate and manage the epidemics like Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Despite the advantages of digital contact tracing, it is not widely used in the western world, including the US and Europe, due to strict privacy regulations and patient rights. We categorized the current approaches for contact tracing, namely: mobile service-provider-application, mobile network operators' call detail, citizen-application, and IoT-based. Current measures for infection control and tracing do not include animals and moving objects like cars despite evidence that these moving objects can be infection carriers. In this paper, we designed and presented a novel privacy anonymous IoT model. We presented an RFID proofof-concept for this model. Our model leverages blockchain's trust-oriented decentralization for on-chain data logging and retrieval. Our model solution will allow moving objects to receive or send notifications when they are close to a flagged, probable, or confirmed diseased case, or flagged place or object. We implemented and presented three prototype blockchain smart contracts for our model. We then simulated contract deployments and execution of functions. We presented the cost differentials. Our simulation results show less than one-second deployment and call time for smart contracts, though, in real life, it can be up to 25 seconds on Ethereum public blockchain. Our simulation results also show that it costs an average of $1.95 to deploy our prototype smart contracts, and an average of $0.34 to call our functions. Our model will make it easy to identify clusters of infection contacts and help deliver a notification for mass isolation while preserving individual privacy. Furthermore, it can be used to understand better human connectivity, model similar other infection spread network, and develop public policies to control the spread of COVID-19 while preparing for future epidemics.

Coherent Detection of Synchronous Low-Rate DoS Attacks

“…. e correlation between the sequences under different time delays is shown in Figure 6 [30][31][32].…”

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) prevention and treatment methods and effective parameters: A systematic literature review

“…Garg et al Garg, Chukwu, Nasser, Chakraborty, and Garg (2020) provided a state-of-the-art the internet of things (IoT)-based approach for tracing the contact to follow the moving infection cases, including vehicles, moving things, animals, and patients with COVID-19 or vectors without symptoms, which can lead to transfer the virus to others and epidemic the disease. This work utilized radio frequency identification (RFID)’s highlight role in determining risky locations and managing the spread of COVID-19 by alerting people via cellphone-based applications and social media.…”

Test, Trace, and Put on the Blockchain?: A Viewpoint Evaluating the Use of Decentralized Systems for Algorithmic Contact Tracing to Combat a Global Pandemic

“…Blockchain has also been suggested as a potential solution in the context of COVID-19 algorithmic contact tracing by promising protection from cyberattacks [23], allowing for global monitoring of social encounters to inform health policies [24], enabling privacy [25,26], preventing the falsification of diagnoses [27], allowing users to retain ownership of personal data [28], and ensuring the trustworthiness of that data [29], while maintaining a record of its provenance [26]. While none of the popular algorithmic contact tracing frameworks on the market today [30] uses blockchain, the growing number of academic works [23,25,27,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] suggests significant interest. Hence, this viewpoint aims to critically examine the potential utility and technical feasibility of blockchain technology for pandemic algorithmic contact tracing.…”