Blockchain-Based: Computer Science Students Develop App for Tamper-Proof Accident Reports

After a car accident, damage documentation usually goes like this: An accident report is filled out on paper, and in addition, those involved take photos with their cell phones. In a project as part of an “Innovation Lab” in the fifth semester, four students of the Bachelor’s degree program in Computer Science at the UAS Technikum Wien developed an application that allows accident reports to be created paperless and tamper-proof using a blockchain. The four students Burak Konca, Maral Mousawi, Ozan Aksakal, Filip Filipovic paid special attention to ensuring that the identification of the accident participants and the vehicles involved is secured, but that the data is still stored anonymously in the blockchain.

For the app, the project team relied on the open-use blockchain Ethereum. There, the data is stored in a tamper-proof manner. The students take advantage of this core property of blockchain systems in their project to ensure the confidentiality of data and documents.

The front end of the app is the website, which the students created using HTML/CSS and JavaScript and which is connected in the web browser to a so-called crypto wallet, which can be used to integrate the encrypted data into the website.

For the back-end, Burak Konca, Maral Mousawi, Ozan Aksakal, Filip Filipovic dealt with the programming of a smart contract. Since the European accident report also uses images or accident sketches and these have to be digitized and stored for the project, the students relied on the IPFS protocol. This allows images to be stored decentrally, and specially assigned “hash values” can then be used to store paths for these images. The hash values are then stored on the Ethereum blockchain in the same way as the form data of the accident reports and assigned to the respective case.