The intangible nature of the COVID-19 virus and the changing strains have created panic and fear among people, leading to an increase in discrimination against COVID-19 positive patients and their families in society. Moreover, the spread of infodemics creates daunting challenges for peaceful livelihood and fighting the pandemic. In this article, we propose CovChain, a blockchain-based Internet of Things solution for identity preservation and anti-infodemics. Toward this, we propose storing patient information on a private blockchain and exploiting its immutability feature, which helps combat infodemics. We further propose encrypting the data using a distributed attribute-based encryption (d-ABE) scheme to facilitate restricted access to information based on the clearance level. We also propose reducing the load on the miners by using geographically-aware fog nodes. As data in a blockchain is immutable, we delete the blocks corresponding to recovering patients and store the information in a forked CovChain. The cardinality of the two chains helps in maintaining a global census by the cloud servers. Through system implementations, we present the feasibility of CovChain on resource-constrained devices within tolerable delays of 1 s, upload and download rates of 35 kb/s, and CPU (single-core) and memory utilization under 70 percent.

中文翻译：

---

CovChain：基于区块链的 COVID-19 身份保护和反信息流行病


COVID-19 病毒的无形性和不断变化的毒株在人们中引起了恐慌和恐惧，导致社会上对 COVID-19 阳性患者及其家人的歧视增加。此外，信息流行病的蔓延给和平生活和抗击疫情带来了严峻挑战。在本文中，我们提出了 CovChain，这是一种基于区块链的物联网解决方案，用于身份保存和反信息流行病。为此，我们建议将患者信息存储在私有区块链上，并利用其不变性功能，这有助于对抗信息流行病。我们进一步建议使用基于分布式属性的加密（d-ABE）方案对数据进行加密，以便根据许可级别限制对信息的访问。我们还建议通过使用地理感知的雾节点来减少矿工的负载。由于区块链中的数据是不可变的，因此我们删除与康复患者相对应的区块，并将信息存储在分叉的 CovChain 中。两条链的基数有助于云服务器维护全球普查。通过系统实现，我们展示了 CovChain 在资源受限设备上的可行性，可容忍延迟为 1 s，上传和下载速率为 35 kb/s，CPU（单核）和内存利用率低于 70%。