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difficult a data tampering attack. There is also a
consensus mechanism among network nodes to de-
cide which blocks are stored in chains (Malik et al.,
2019)(Nofer et al., 2017). In our proposal, we de-
tail the existing roles in the vaccination process and
their relations. Roles are described considering their
responsibilities in recording and accessing data.
In the next section, related work is presented. In
Section 3, we describe a prototype that implements
the proposal, by focusing on vaccine administration.
In Section 4, there is a discussion about the implica-
tions regarding the proposal. In the last section, we
present concluding remarks and indicate future work.
2 RELATED WORK
Traditional vaccination methods consist of a tech-
nique called number labelling (Yong et al., 2020),
which does not allow accurate vaccine traceability.
Using number labelling, there is only estimated num-
bers of a situation, without a confirmation if these
numbers represent the reality. For instance, a gov-
ernment knows the vaccine doses number per region
and used doses; however, they do not know who is
vaccinated in a given neighbourhood or city.
Vaccination process faces challenges. For in-
stance, records can be forged in order to hide the real
numbers of vaccinated people or vaccines dosages can
be stolen (Yong et al., 2020). In the cases of large
amount of immunizations with no centralized data, it
is faced difficulties on data computation (Peng et al.,
2020). With a data tampering attack, it is possible
to lose relevant data (Peng et al., 2020). There can
also be cases in which people travel to another region
to get the vaccine, impacting the resource allocation
(Queiroz et al., 2020). It is important to have a coor-
dination between vaccine transportation and produc-
tion, providing vaccine distribution supervision (Hu
et al., 2019). Furthermore, the lack of registered
records can make more difficult a vaccination cam-
paign (Eisenstadt et al., 2020).
Yong et al. (2020) proposes a work that uses
Blockchain and machine learning in the management
system for the supervision of vaccine supply. The
main concern is to provide a reliable mechanism
where it is possible to trace problems during the vac-
cine production, such as vaccine expiration and vac-
cine record fraud. The mechanism also suggests a
vaccination recommendation, allowing to identify the
better vaccine in a given scenario. Despite of present-
ing an architecture, the authors do not describe roles
or protocols to be adopted by the tool.
Peng et al. (2020) present a work centered on
a safe vaccine production, using Blockchain method
for supervision. The idea is to keep private enterprise
data and public information with product records and
vaccine information (e.g. vaccine name, expiration
date). The work presents an initial application of
Blockchain; however it does not present details of the
roles in the suggested process.
Eisenstadt et al. (2020) describe an approach to
certification, using Blockchain and mobile devices.
The work aims to improve the development phase of
an antibody or a vaccine, in order to provide data to
the certification process (by preserving privacy). The
authors present briefly the roles when using their tool.
Due to Covid-19, Brazilian government created
the “Conecte SUS” app to have a digital record of
vaccination. It aims to trace the vaccination in pub-
lic and private institutions (Brazil, 2021). The work
describes and discusses usability and scalability of
Blockchain on mobile devices platforms. It provides
an explanation of the vaccination registry using a
smartphone, but the system as a whole is not detailed.
3 A BLOCKCHAIN APPROACH
FOR VACCINATION
Here we describe our digital approach to aid the vac-
cination process in a country. We present a scheme
with roles and their relations, considering the process
since the production of a vaccine until its inocula-
tion. The goal is to address problems related to lack
of registration records and standardization of records,
which in turn can aid the definition strategic vaccina-
tion plan, as well as the coordination of vaccine pro-
duction and distribution. As a digital platform, we use
of Blockchain mainly due to its reliability character-
istic. So, it is possible to eliminate the lack of records
(since information about the vaccine is registered), to
avoid data tampering and to mitigate cases of forged
records.
It is known that vaccination is a complicated pro-
cess, which can be different in distinct countries. In
this paper, we detail a general and reliable protocol.
Figure 1 shows the proposed approach. Roles are
needed to be defined in a way to control data manip-
ulation in the Blockchain. In order to control data
consistency, we delimit what kind of data each role is
allowed to register or fetch.
Government refers to the entity that controls and
coordinates processes around a society. Government
is the main role and it is allowed to access almost all
data. Person represents any individual in a society. A
Person can receive a vaccine. Enterprise is respon-
sible to develop, test and distribute vaccines. Vac-
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