Efficient Contact Tracing for pandemics using blockchain

Blockchain technologies have been benefiting many industries by being decentralized, secure and confidential. They offer great potential in pandemic impacted scenarios as well. Contact tracing helps to mitigate the transmission of disease by alerting people who may have been exposed so they can act on time to protect themselves. Contact tracing systems face some challenges related to issues of medical privacy, data security and transparency. Multiple researches show concern that contact tracing discourages people to seek medication because of the fear of loss of data, subsequent stigma, discrimination, or abuse. In this paper, we discuss how contact tracing can be improved using blockchain technology and could be able to solve these issues. The aim of our proposed system would be to reduce the impact of pandemic, to implement this merger of the blockchains and the Contact tracing app and to ensure user privacy and avoid data misuse by incorporating a symmetric key cryptographic mechanism. To tackle the scalability related issues of Blockchain this framework uses IPFS, a distributed file storage system also known as Interplanetary File System. This blockchain based solution system will enhance contact tracing by making it more stable, secure, performant, highly useable and above all effective in the fight against any pandemic.