Protecting Vaccine Safety: An Improved, Blockchain-Based, Storage-Efficient Scheme

IEEE Trans Cybern. 2023 Jun;53(6):3588-3598. doi: 10.1109/TCYB.2022.3163743. Epub 2023 May 17.

Abstract

In recent years, vaccine safety incidents have occurred frequently. To protect vaccine safety, researchers have proposed to use blockchain to secure the vaccine circulation process. Technically, blockchain has some limitations in solving vaccine and other supply chain problems, such as large on-chain storage consumption and low throughput. To better alleviate these restrictions, we propose an improved, blockchain-based, storage-efficient vaccine safety protection scheme in this work. Specifically, we first model the vaccine circulation process. We then design a system to protect vaccine circulation using blockchain, cloud, and cryptographic mechanisms. The proposed system leverages the cloud to implement the vaccine circulation model. Correspondingly, it uses the blockchain to store circulating data certificates and signatures. We evaluated the proposed conceptual model using a consortium blockchain. The experimental results show that the proposed system is efficient.

MeSH terms

  • Blockchain*
  • Computer Security
  • Electronic Health Records

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61872243, Grant 61872197, Grant 61772345, and Grant U1713212: in part by the National Key Research and Development Plan of China under Grant 2018YFB1800302 and Grant 2018YFB1800805; in part by the Shenzhen Science and Technology Program under Grant RCYX20200714114645048, Grant JCYJ20190808142207420, and Grant GJHZ20190822095416463; in part by the Pearl River Young Scholars funding of Shenzhen University; in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province-Outstanding Youth Program under Grant 2019B151502018; in part by the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation under Grant 2020A1515011489; and in part by the Project from Webank and SZU-Webank Fintech Research Institute.