BLOCOVID: A blockchain-based COVID-19 digital vaccination certificate verification system

Abstract

The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been felt in diverse ways. Although the death rate in Africa has not been as devastating as predicted by the World Health Organization (WHO), its economic and social impact has been fully felt by the African continent. As the world goes through the vaccination process to achieve herd immunity, Africa has not only faced problems like the inability to produce and procure vaccines, but some countries in the west are doubting the authenticity of the vaccination process and even vaccine certificates coming from various countries on the continent. The approach of using centralized systems to validate COVID-19 vaccine certificates makes these systems susceptible to Denial of Service (DoS), modification, and Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attacks. To curb this problem, we proposed a blockchain-based digital COVID-19 vaccination certificate verification system called BLOCOVID. The proposed system uses the decentralized approach of distributed ledgers to ensure that vaccine certificates are secured, immutable, and verifiable. Our proposed system stores vaccine serial numbers and their corresponding certificates as hash values. These hash values are stored on the blockchain network as transaction values. The authenticity of a vaccine certificate is determined by the availability of the hash values of the certificate and its corresponding vaccine serial number on the blockchain network. The proposed system was simulated using the BlockSim simulator. To begin with, the simulation results show that the proposed system can ensure system availability, thereby minimizing DoS attacks. Secondly, the proposed system can ensure the integrity of vaccine certificates by allowing third parties to verify the authenticity of these certificates. The simulation results show that even with 10240 nodes, the average transaction time was 137.2ms, with a total transaction rate of 9911.034 transactions per second.