Hygiea: A secure, smart, privacy-preserving and interoperable Blockchain solution for the Covid-19 pandemic

In this article we present Hygiea, an end-to-end blockchain-based solution for the Covid-19 pandemic. Hygiea has two main objectives. The first is to allow governments to issue Covid-19 related certificates to citizens that can be verified by designated verifiers to ensure safer workplaces. The second is to provide the necessary tools to experts and decision makers to better understand the impact of the pandemic through statistical models built on top of the data collected by the platform. This work covers all steps of the certificate issuance, verification and revocation cycles with well-defined roles for all stakeholders. We also propose a governance model that is implemented via smart contracts ensuring security, transparency and auditability. Finally, we propose techniques for deriving statistical models that can be used by decision makers.

[1]  Hans-Peter Kriegel,et al.  LoOP: local outlier probabilities , 2009, CIKM.

[2]  Daniel Davis Wood,et al.  ETHEREUM: A SECURE DECENTRALISED GENERALISED TRANSACTION LEDGER , 2014 .

[3]  Hitesh Tewari,et al.  Framework for a DLT Based COVID-19 Passport , 2020, SAI.

[4]  Mehmet Aydar,et al.  Towards a Blockchain based digital identity verification, record attestation and record sharing system , 2019, ArXiv.

[5]  Samuel B. Williams,et al.  ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY , 2000 .

[6]  Blockchain and COVID-19 Pandemic: Applications and Challenges , 2020 .

[7]  Ralph Johnson,et al.  design patterns elements of reusable object oriented software , 2019 .

[8]  Katina Kralevska,et al.  Blockchain in healthcare and health sciences - A scoping review , 2019, Int. J. Medical Informatics.

[9]  C. P. Schnorr,et al.  Efficient Identification and Signatures for Smart Cards (Abstract) , 1989, EUROCRYPT.

[10]  David Butler,et al.  SecureABC: Secure AntiBody Certificates for COVID-19 , 2020, ArXiv.

[11]  Herbert W. Hethcote,et al.  The Mathematics of Infectious Diseases , 2000, SIAM Rev..

[12]  Zhi-Hua Zhou,et al.  Isolation Forest , 2008, 2008 Eighth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining.

[13]  Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin : A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System , 2009 .

[14]  Marc Eisenstadt,et al.  COVID-19 Antibody Test/Vaccination Certification: There's an App for That , 2020, IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology.

[15]  Harry Halpin,et al.  Vision: A Critique of Immunity Passports and W3C Decentralized Identifiers , 2020, SSR.

[16]  Georgios Kambourakis,et al.  Sharing pandemic vaccination certificates through blockchain: Case study and performance evaluation , 2021, Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput..

[17]  Wei Xu,et al.  Improving one-class SVM for anomaly detection , 2003, Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics (IEEE Cat. No.03EX693).

[18]  H. Clapham,et al.  Ethical Implementation of Immunity Passports During the COVID-19 Pandemic , 2020, The Journal of infectious diseases.

[19]  Steven L. Scott,et al.  Inferring causal impact using Bayesian structural time-series models , 2015, 1506.00356.

[20]  Khaled Salah,et al.  Blockchain-Based Solution for COVID-19 Digital Medical Passports and Immunity Certificates , 2020, IEEE Access.