A Blockchain-based Contactless Delivery System for Addressing COVID-19 and Other Pandemics

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has significantly impacted and changed our daily routines. Worldwide, people have had to adapt by undergoing remote work and self-quarantine. This situation has required transforming strategies for various logistics services for a variety of service providers, such as retail stores and restaurants. The concept of contactless delivery has emerged to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. However, contactless delivery only reduces the direct interaction between the delivery personnel and the customer. In addition to peer-to-peer contact, items still go through insecure interactions between and among the delivery personnel and other unknown third parties. Even if the items are delivered without physical contact, concerns remain about their routes in the supply chain. In this paper, we present a novel blockchain-based framework to enable the traceability of products in the supply chain. This framework records and tracks delivery traces and the medical status of delivery personnel in a privacy-preserved manner, ultimately contributing to COVID-19 prevention and control. We build a Hyperledger Fabric-based blockchain prototype system as our testbed. Several smart contract functions are implemented and evaluated to show the efficiency of the proposed framework. In conjunction with the implementation and evaluation, we also perform comprehensive security and privacy analyses of this framework.