A practical blockchain-based vaccine supply management framework with verifiability and traceability

Abstract With increasing global demand for vaccines and the changing level of biotechnology, vaccines become an important force to promote the development of the global pharmaceutical market. Vaccine forms an important basis for human self-protection. At present, existing vaccine supply management is mostly established in a centralized manner with a central authority (CA) for assuring trust. This approach requires that a trusted CA be set up, and it incurs overhead costs in communications and storage in networks. At the same time, issues such as the authenticity, integrity, and privacy are still widespread in vaccine supply management. Therefore, it is crucial to study a vaccine supply management traceability scheme that can be supervised in a decentralized manner and whose data cannot be tampered with or forged. In view of the security and efficiency problems in the existing vaccine supply management traceability scheme, a practical blockchain-based vaccine supply management framework with verifiability and traceability is proposed in this paper. This architecture can solve the lack of centralization in the existing vaccine supply management and the problems of data falsification, tampering, and low work efficiency in the current vaccine supply supervision process. At the same time, aiming at the lack of efficiency and security of the existing signature schemes suitable for consortium chains, an improved SM2 digital signature algorithm based on key distribution authentication and modulo-free inverse operation is designed, which improves the signature efficiency and reliability in the signature verification process. Then, we design a new way to store vaccine production records, which can avoid the forgery and modification of production records by treating the production record of each production step as a separate piece of data. Based on the decentralized and traceable feature of the framework, it can well resolve the trust issue between consumers and the vaccine regulators. Consumers can be allowed to verify the authenticity of vaccine supply management process. In addition, the security analysis shows that the proposed framework meets all desired security requirements. Compared with similar solutions, the proposed scheme takes less computation and communication costs. Hence, our construction is more appropriate for practical vaccine supply management.