Privacy-preserving contact tracing in 5G-integrated and blockchain-based medical applications

Abstract

The current pandemic situation due to COVID-19 is seriously affecting our daily work and life. To block the propagation of infectious diseases, an effective contact tracing mechanism needs to be implemented. Unfortunately, existing schemes have severe privacy issues that jeopardize the identity-privacy and location-privacy for both users and patients. Although some privacy-preserving systems have been proposed, there remain several issues caused by centralization. To mitigate this issues, we propose a P rivacy-preserving contact T racing scheme in 5G-integrated and B lockchain-based M edical applications, named PTBM. In PTBM, the 5G-integrated network is leveraged as the underlying infrastructure where everyone can perform location checking with his mobile phones or even wearable devices connected to 5G network to find whether they have been in possible contact with a diagnosed patient without violating their privacy. A trusted medical center can effectively trace the patients and their corresponding close contacts. Thorough security and performance analysis show that the proposed PTBM scheme achieves privacy protection, traceability, reliability, and authentication, with high computation & communication efficiency and low latency.

Blockchain as an enabling technology in the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review

“…Together, these two areas that symbolize the broad area of health represent about 60% of all mentioned. These papers propose assistance to authorities in assuring that the COVID-19 medical waste is disposed of properly and COVID-19 testing centers are using genuine medical equipment to treat COVID-19 patients [ 36 ], a solution for managing data related to COVID-19 vaccines’ distribution and delivery [ 37 ], to develop a tracking system for COVID-19 data collected from external sources and ensure privacy, trust and traceability for patients’ information [ 3 , 31 , 38 , 39 ].

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iFaaSBus: A Security- and Privacy-Based Lightweight Framework for Serverless Computing Using IoT and Machine Learning

“…These practices have brought some concerns, such as the privacy and security of the person, which has been discussed in the literature [16]. Most COVID-19 contact tracking applications are monitoring the spread of the disease with GPS, the literature reported [17], [18]. Therefore, COVID-19 applications are still an area that needs to be investigated regarding user privacy and security.…”

Privacy Preservation of User Identity in Contact Tracing for COVID-19-Like Pandemics Using Edge Computing

“…However, a malicious or compromised server in all architectures is able to perform many data poisoning attacks or user identification attacks by colluding with other malicious entities. In addition, malicious users may not only delete or alter uploaded data for any reason [13] but also carry out de-anonymization attacks to link users' identities to their contact tracing information [14]. Hence, attackers may be able to utilize rely, delayed replay, or poisoning attacks to compromise the whole system or a given user [7,14].…”

“…Hence, attackers may be able to utilize rely, delayed replay, or poisoning attacks to compromise the whole system or a given user [7,14]. Researchers have consequently proposed the utilization of blockchain, which is a collection of data blocks linked using cryptographic hashes to ensure that data is immutable and tamper-proof [9,13,15]. Additionally, the immutability of blockchain has ensured trust of shared data on decentralized applications [13,15].…”

“…Blockchain-based data sharing has many privacypreserving applications, especially in medical data sharing [13,15,16]. Thus, blockchain has mainly two variations regarding permission to append data: public permissionless blockchain and authorized permissioned blockchain [13].…”