This paper discusses the aspects of data reliability and user privacy for the emerging practice of mobile phone based contact tracing for the COVID-19 pandemic. Various countries and large technology companies have already used or plan to design and use mobile phone based solutions, in an effort to urgently expedite the process of identifying people who may have been exposed to the disease and limit its spread to the general population. However, serious concerns have been raised both in terms of the validity of the collected data as well as the extent to which implemented approaches can breach the privacy of the mobile phone users. This review examines the weaknesses of existing implementations and concludes with specific recommendations that can contribute towards increasing the safety of infrastructures that collect and process this kind of information, as well as the adoption and acceptance of these solutions from the public.
Contact tracing in the COVID-19 pandemic is key to prevent the further spread of COVID-19. Countries and regions around the world have developed and deployed or are considering adopting contact-tracing software or mobile apps. While contact tracing apps and software play an important role in the pandemic, red flags have been raised regarding the privacy risk associated with contact tracing. In this short paper, we provide an overview on the GPS and Bluetooth based contact-tracing apps in the framework of both centralized and decentralized models, examine the associated privacy risk and the eff…
Several contact tracing solutions have been proposed and implemented all around the globe to combat the spread of COVID-19 pandemic. But, most of these solutions endanger the privacy rights of the individuals and hinder their widespread adoption. We propose a privacy-preserving contact tracing protocol for the efficient tracing of the spread of the global pandemic. It is based on the private set intersection (PSI) protocol and utilizes the homomorphic properties to preserve the privacy at the individual level. A hierarchical model for the representation of landscapes and rate-limiting factor o…
The world is under an ongoing pandemic, COVID-19, of a scale last seen a century ago. Contact tracing is one of the most critical and highly effective tools for containing and breaking the chain of infections especially in the case of infectious respiratory diseases like COVID-19. Thanks to the technological progress in our times, we now have digital mobile applications like the Corona-Warn-App for digital contact tracing. However, due to the invasive nature of contact tracing, it is very important to preserve the privacy of the users. Privacy preservation is important for increasing trust in …
We respond to a recent short paper by de Motjoye et el. on privacy issues with Covid-19 tracking. Their paper, which we discuss here, is structured around three "toy protocols" for the design of an app which can maximise the utility of contact tracing information while minimising the more general risk to privacy. On this basis, the paper proceeds to introduce eight questions against which they should be assessed. The questions raised and the protocols proposed effectively amount to the creation of a game with different categories of players able to make different moves. It is therefore possibl…
How to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus is a major concern for most countries. As the situation continues to change, various countries are making efforts to reopen their economies by lifting some restrictions and enforcing new measures to prevent the spread. In this work, we review some approaches that have been adopted to contain the COVID-19 virus such as contact tracing, clusters identification, movement restrictions, and status validation. Specifically, we classify available techniques based on some characteristics such as technology, architecture, trade-offs (privacy vs utility), …
On June 16, 2020, Germany launched an open-source smartphone contact tracing app ("Corona-Warn-App") to help tracing SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) infection chains. It uses a decentralized, privacy-preserving design based on the Exposure Notification APIs in which a centralized server is only used to distribute a list of keys of SARS-CoV-2 infected users that is fetched by the app once per day. Its success, however, depends on its adoption. In this poster, we characterize the early adoption of the app using Netflow traces captured directly at its hosting infrastructure. We show that the app generat…
With the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantines took place across the globe. In the aim of stopping or slowing the progression of the COVID-19 contamination, many countries have deployed a contact tracing system to notify persons that be in contact with a COVID-positive person. The contact tracing system is implemented in a mobile application and leverages technologies such as Bluetooth to trace interactions between persons. This paper discusses different smart-phone applications based on contact tracing system from privacy point of view.
Coronavirus disease 2019, i.e. COVID-19 has imposed the public health measure of keeping social distancing for preventing mass transmission of COVID-19. For monitoring the social distancing and keeping the trace of transmission, we are obligated to develop various types of digital surveillance systems, which include contact tracing systems and drone-based monitoring systems. Due to the inconvenience of manual labor, traditional contact tracing systems are gradually replaced by the efficient automated contact tracing applications that are developed for smartphones. However, the commencement of …
The 2019 Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by a quick dissemination of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has had a deep impact worldwide, both in terms of the loss of human life and the economic and social disruption. The use of digital technologies has been seen as an important effort to combat the pandemic and one of such technologies is contact tracing applications. These applications were successfully employed to face other infectious diseases, thus they have been used during the current pandemic. However, the use of contact tracing poses sever…
Governments, Healthcare, and Private Organizations in the global scale have been using digital tracking to keep COVID-19 outbreaks under control. Although this method could limit pandemic contagion, it raises significant concerns about user privacy. Known as ~"Contact Tracing Apps", these mobile applications are facilitated by Cellphone Service Providers (CSPs), who enable the spatial and temporal real-time user tracking. Accordingly, it might be speculated that CSPs collect information violating the privacy policies such as GDPR, CCPA, and others. To further clarify, we conducted an in-depth …
Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, there has been increased interest in the use of digital contact tracing as a means of stopping chains of viral transmission, provoking alarm from privacy advocates. Concerning the ethics of this technology, recent studies have predominantly focused on (1) the formation of guidelines for ethical contact tracing, (2) the analysis of specific implementations, or (3) the review of a select number of contact tracing applications and their relevant privacy or ethical implications. In this study, we provide a comprehensive survey of the evolving …
A number of groups, from governments to non-profits, have quickly acted to innovate the contact-tracing process: they are designing, building, and launching contact-tracing apps in response to the COVID-19 crisis. A diverse range of approaches exist, creating challenging choices for officials looking to implement contact-tracing technology in their community and raising concerns about these choices among citizens asked to participate in contact tracing. We are frequently asked how to evaluate and differentiate between the options for contact-tracing applications. Here, we share the questions w…
There is growing interest in technology-enabled contact tracing, the process of identifying potentially infected COVID-19 patients by notifying all recent contacts of an infected person. Governments, technology companies, and research groups alike recognize the potential for smartphones, IoT devices, and wearable technology to automatically track "close contacts" and identify prior contacts in the event of an individual's positive test. However, there is currently significant public discussion about the tensions between effective technology-based contact tracing and the privacy of individuals.…
Today's smartphones are equipped with a large number of powerful value-added sensors and features such as a low power Bluetooth sensor, powerful embedded sensors such as the digital compass, accelerometer, GPS sensors, Wi-Fi capabilities, microphone, humidity sensors, health tracking sensors, and a camera, etc. These value-added sensors have revolutionized the lives of the human being in many ways such, as tracking the health of the patients and movement of doctors, tracking employees movement in large manufacturing units, and monitoring the environment, etc. These embedded sensors could also …
Large-scale COVID-19 infections have occurred worldwide, which has caused tremendous impact on the economy and people's lives. The traditional method for tracing contagious virus, for example, determining the infection chain according to the memory of infected people, has many drawbacks. With the continuous spread of the pandemic, many countries or organizations have started to study how to use mobile devices to trace COVID-19, aiming to help people automatically record information about incidents with infected people through technologies, reducing the manpower required to determine the infect…
The coronavirus (COVID-19) has appeared as the greatest challenge due to its continuous structural evolution as well as the absence of proper antidotes for this particular virus. The virus mainly spreads and replicates itself among mass people through close contact which unfortunately can happen in many unpredictable ways. Therefore, to slow down the spread of this novel virus, the only relevant initiatives are to maintain social distance, perform contact tracing, use proper safety gears, and impose quarantine measures. But despite being theoretically possible, these approaches are very diffic…
To address the massive spike in uncertainties triggered by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), there is an ever-increasing number of national governments that are rolling out contact-tracing Apps to aid the containment of the virus. The first hugely contentious issue facing the Apps is the deployment framework, i.e. centralized or decentralized. Based on this, the debate branches out to the corresponding technologies that underpin these architectures, i.e. GPS, QR codes, and Bluetooth. This work conducts a pioneering review of the above scenarios and contributes a geolocation mapping of the cu…
There is growing use of technology-enabled contact tracing, the process of identifying potentially infected COVID-19 patients by notifying all recent contacts of an infected person. Governments, technology companies, and research groups alike have been working towards releasing smartphone apps, using IoT devices, and distributing wearable technology to automatically track "close contacts" and identify prior contacts in the event an individual tests positive. However, there has been significant public discussion about the tensions between effective technology-based contact tracing and the priva…
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has made manual contact tracing difficult. Thus, various public health authorities have experimented with automatic contact tracing using mobile applications (or "apps"). These apps, however, have raised security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose an automated security and privacy assessment tool, COVIDGUARDIAN, which combines identification and analysis of Personal Identification Information (PII), static program analysis and data flow analysis, to determine security and privacy weaknesses. Furthermore, in light of our findings, we undertake a user st…
The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has taken the world by surprise, forcing lockdowns and straining public health care systems. COVID-19 is known to be a highly infectious virus, and infected individuals do not initially exhibit symptoms, while some remain asymptomatic. Thus, a non-negligible fraction of the population can, at any given time, be a hidden source of transmissions. In response, many governments have shown great interest in smartphone contact tracing apps that help automate the difficult task of tracing all recent contacts of newly identified infected individuals. However, tracing ap…
The COVID19 pandemic spread across the world in late 2019 and early 2020. As the pandemic spread, technologists joined forces with public health officials to develop apps to support COVID19 response. Yet, for these technological solutions to benefit public health, users must be willing to adopt these apps.This paper details the potential inputs to a user's decision to adopt a COVID19 contact-tracing app or other technology and empirically validates the relevance of these inputs via both the literature and a demographically-representative survey of 1,000 Americans.
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）
A growing number of contact tracing apps are being developed to complement manual contact tracing. A key question is whether users will be willing to adopt these contact tracing apps. In this work, we survey over 4,500 Americans to evaluate (1) the effect of both accuracy and privacy concerns on reported willingness to install COVID19 contact tracing apps and (2) how different groups of users weight accuracy vs. privacy. Drawing on our findings from these first two research questions, we (3) quantitatively model how the amount of public health benefit (reduction in infection rate), amount of i…
The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an urgent need for effective contact tracing solutions through mobile phone applications to prevent the infection from spreading further. However, due to the nature of contact tracing, public concern on privacy issues has been a bottleneck to the existing solutions, which is significantly affecting the uptake of contact tracing applications across the globe. In this paper, we present a blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving contact tracing scheme: BeepTrace, where we propose to adopt blockchain bridging the user/patient and the authorized solvers to…
The current COVID-19 pandemic highlights the utility of contact tracing, when combined with case isolation and social distancing, as an important tool for mitigating the spread of a disease [1]. Contact tracing provides a mechanism of identifying individuals with a high likelihood of previous exposure to a contagious disease, allowing additional precautions to be put in place to prevent continued transmission. Here we consider a cryptographic approach to contact tracing based on secure two-party computation (2PC). We begin by considering the problem of comparing a set of location histories hel…
During a pandemic, contact tracing is an essential tool to drive down the infection rate within a population. To accelerate the laborious manual contact tracing process, digital contact tracing (DCT) tools can track contact events transparently and privately by using the sensing and signaling capabilities of the ubiquitous cell phone. However, an effective DCT must not only preserve user privacy but also augment the existing manual contact tracing process. Indeed, not every member of a population may own a cell phone or have a DCT app installed and enabled. We present KHOVID to fulfill the com…
The global outbreak of COVID-19 has led to focus on efforts to manage and mitigate the continued spread of the disease. One of these efforts include the use of contact tracing to identify people who are at-risk of developing the disease through exposure to an infected person. Historically, contact tracing has been primarily manual but given the exponential spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, there has been significant interest in the development and use of digital contact tracing solutions to supplement the work of human contact tracers. The collection and use of sensitive personal detai…
Contact tracing is an essential tool for public health officials and local communities to fight the spread of novel diseases, such as for the COVID-19 pandemic. The Singaporean government just released a mobile phone app, TraceTogether, that is designed to assist health officials in tracking down exposures after an infected individual is identified. However, there are important privacy implications of the existence of such tracking apps. Here, we analyze some of those implications and discuss ways of ameliorating the privacy concerns without decreasing usefulness to public health. We hope in w…
How to avoid a second wave of COVID-19 after reopening the economy is a pressing question. The extremely high basic reproductive number $R_0$ (5.7 to 6.4, shown in new studies) of SARS-CoV-2 further complicates the challenge. Here we assess effects of Social distancing 2.0, i.e. proximity alert (to maintain inter-personal distance) plus privacy-preserving contact tracing. To solve the dual task, we developed an open source mobile app. The app uses a Bluetooth-based, decentralized contact tracing platform over which the anonymous user ID cannot be linked by the government or a third party. Mode…
Governments around the world have become increasingly frustrated with tech giants dictating public health policy. The software created by Apple and Google enables individuals to track their own potential exposure through collated exposure notifications. However, the same software prohibits location tracking, denying key information needed by public health officials for robust contract tracing. This information is needed to treat and isolate COVID-19 positive people, identify transmission hotspots, and protect against continued spread of infection. In this article, we present two simple ideas: …
Digital contact tracing has emerged as a viable tool supplementing manual contact tracing. To date, more than 100 contact tracing applications have been published to slow down the spread of highly contagious Covid-19. Despite subtle variabilities among these applications, all of them achieve contact tracing by manipulating the following three components: a) use a personal device to identify the user while designing a secure protocol to anonymize the user's identity; b) leverage networking technologies to analyze and store the data; c) exploit rich sensing features on the user device to detect …
Contact tracing is a very effective way to control the COVID-19-like pandemics. It aims to identify individuals who closely contacted an infected person during the incubation period of the virus and notify them to quarantine. However, the existing systems suffer from privacy, security, and efficiency issues. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving Blockchain-based infection control system. Instead of depending on a single authority to run the system, a group of health authorities, that form a consortium Blockchain, run our system. Using Block…
The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic gave rise to management approaches using mobile apps for contact tracing. The corresponding apps track individuals and their interactions, to facilitate alerting users of potential infections well before they become infectious themselves. Naive implementation obviously jeopardizes the privacy of health conditions, location, activities, and social interaction of its users. A number of protocol designs for colocation tracking have already been developed, most of which claim to function in a privacy preserving manner. However, despite claims such as "GDPR compliance…
The coronavirus pandemic is a new reality and it severely affects the modus vivendi of the international community. In this context, governments are rushing to devise or embrace novel surveillance mechanisms and monitoring systems to fight the outbreak. The development of digital tracing apps, which among others are aimed at automatising and globalising the prompt alerting of individuals at risk in a privacy-preserving manner is a prominent example of this ongoing effort. Very promptly, a number of digital contact tracing architectures has been sprouted, followed by relevant app implementation…
COVID-19 has fundamentally disrupted the way we live. Government bodies, universities, and companies worldwide are rapidly developing technologies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and safely reopen society. Essential analytics tools such as contact tracing, super-spreader event detection, and exposure mapping require collecting and analyzing sensitive user information. The increasing use of such powerful data-driven applications necessitates a secure, privacy-preserving infrastructure for computation on personal data. In this paper, we analyze two such computing infrastructures under developmen…
The global health threat from COVID-19 has been controlled in a number of instances by large-scale testing and contact tracing efforts. We created this document to suggest three functionalities on how we might best harness computing technologies to supporting the goals of public health organizations in minimizing morbidity and mortality associated with the spread of COVID-19, while protecting the civil liberties of individuals. In particular, this work advocates for a third-party free approach to assisted mobile contact tracing, because such an approach mitigates the security and privacy risks…
In their efforts to tackle the COVID-19 crisis, decision makers are considering the development and use of smartphone applications for contact tracing. Even though these applications differ in technology and methods, there is an increasing concern about their implications for privacy and human rights. Here we propose a framework to evaluate their suitability in terms of impact on the users, employed technology and governance methods. We illustrate its usage with three applications, and with the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) guidelines, highlighting their limitations.
Google and Apple jointly introduced a digital contact tracing technology and an API called "exposure notification," to help health organizations and governments with contact tracing. The technology and its interplay with security and privacy constraints require investigation. In this study, we examine and analyze the security, privacy, and reliability of the technology with actual and typical scenarios (and expected typical adversary in mind), and quite realistic use cases. We do it in the context of Virginia's COVIDWISE app. This experimental analysis validates the properties of the system un…
This document describes and analyzes a system for secure and privacy-preserving proximity tracing at large scale. This system, referred to as DP3T, provides a technological foundation to help slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by simplifying and accelerating the process of notifying people who might have been exposed to the virus so that they can take appropriate measures to break its transmission chain. The system aims to minimise privacy and security risks for individuals and communities and guarantee the highest level of data protection. The goal of our proximity tracing system is to determine w…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）
Recently, as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, dependence on Contact Tracing (CT) models has significantly increased to prevent spread of this highly contagious virus and be prepared for the potential future ones. Since the spreading probability of the novel coronavirus in indoor environments is much higher than that of the outdoors, there is an urgent and unmet quest to develop/design efficient, autonomous, trustworthy, and secure indoor CT solutions. Despite such an urgency, this field is still in its infancy. The paper addresses this gap and proposes the Trustworthy Blockchain-enabled…
The present paper addresses the task of reliably identifying critical contacts by using COVID-19 tracing apps. A reliable classification is crucial to ensure a high level of protection, and at the same time to prevent many people from being sent to quarantine by the app. Tracing apps are based on the capabilities of current smartphones to enable a broadest possible availability. Existing capabilities of smartphones include the exchange of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals and of audio signals, as well as the use of gyroscopes and magnetic sensors. The Bluetooth power measurements, which are o…
Contact tracing is the techno-choice of reference to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the current approaches have severe privacy and security issues and fail to offer a sustainable contact tracing infrastructure. We address these issues introducing an innovative, privacy-preserving, sustainable, and experimentally tested architecture that leverages batteryless BLE beacons.
As humanity struggles to contain the global COVID-19 pandemic, privacy concerns are emerging regarding confinement, tracing and testing. The scientific debate concerning privacy of the COVID-19 tracing efforts has been intense, especially focusing on the choice between centralised and decentralised tracing apps. The privacy concerns regarding COVID-19 testing, however, have not received as much attention even though the privacy at stake is arguably even higher. COVID-19 tests require the collection of samples. Those samples possibly contain viral material but inevitably also human DNA. Patient…
The adoption of digital contact tracing (DCT) technology during the COVID-19pandemic has shown multiple benefits, including helping to slow the spread of infectious disease and to improve the dissemination of accurate information. However, to support both ethical technology deployment and user adoption, privacy must be at the forefront. With the loss of privacy being a critical threat, thorough threat modeling will help us to strategize and protect privacy as digital contact tracing technologies advance. Various threat modeling frameworks exist today, such as LINDDUN, STRIDE, PASTA, and NIST, …
The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) is imposing a severe worldwide lock-down. Contact tracing based on smartphones' applications (apps) has emerged as a possible solution to trace contagions and enforce a more sustainable selective quarantine. However, a massive adoption of these apps is required to reach the critical mass needed for effective contact tracing. As an alternative, geo-location technologies in next generation networks (e.g., 5G) can enable Mobile Operators (MOs) to perform passive tracing of users' mobility and contacts with a promised accuracy of down to one mete…
Existing Bluetooth-based Private Contact Tracing (PCT) systems can privately detect whether people have come into direct contact with COVID-19 patients. However, we find that the existing systems lack functionality and flexibility, which may hurt the success of the contact tracing. Specifically, they cannot detect indirect contact (e.g., people may be exposed to coronavirus because of used the same elevator even without direct contact); they also cannot flexibly change the rules of "risky contact", such as how many hours of exposure or how close to a COVID-19 patient that is considered as risk…
We present Tracer Tokens, a hardware token of privacy-preserving contact tracing utilizing Exposure Notification \cite{GAEN} protocol. Through subnetworks, we show that any disease spread by proximity can be traced such as seasonal flu, cold, regional strains of COVID-19, or Tuberculosis. Further, we show this protocol to notify $n^n$ users in parallel, providing a speed of information unmatched by current contact tracing methods.
In this paper, we propose a new privacy-preserving, automated contact tracing system, ACOUSTIC-TURF, to fight COVID-19 using acoustic signals sent from ubiquitous mobile devices. At a high level, ACOUSTIC-TURF adaptively broadcasts inaudible ultrasonic signals with randomly generated IDs in the vicinity. Simultaneously, the system receives other ultrasonic signals sent from nearby (e.g., 6 feet) users. In such a system, individual user IDs are not disclosed to others and the system can accurately detect encounters in physical proximity with 6-foot granularity. We have implemented a prototype o…
Contact tracing is an important method to control the spread of an infectious disease such as COVID-19. However, existing contact tracing methods alone cannot provide sufficient coverage and do not successfully address privacy concerns of the participating entities. Current solutions do not utilize the huge volume of data stored in business databases and individual digital devices. This information is typically stored in data silos and cannot be used due to regulations in place. To successfully unlock the potential of contact tracing, we need to consider both data utilization from multiple sou…
COVID-19 is a severe global epidemic in human history. Even though there are particular medications and vaccines to curb the epidemic, tracing and isolating the infection source is the best option to slow the virus spread and reduce infection and death rates. There are three disadvantages to the existing contact tracing system: 1. User data is stored in a centralized database that could be stolen and tampered with, 2. User's confidential personal identity may be revealed to a third party or organization, 3. Existing contact tracing systems only focus on information sharing from one dimension, …
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has led to a global lockdown with severe health and economical consequences. As a result, authorities around the globe have expressed their needs for better tools to monitor the spread of the virus and to support human labor. Researchers and technology companies such as Google and Apple have offered to develop such tools in the form of contact tracing applications. The goal of these applications is to continuously track people's proximity and to make the smartphone users aware if they have ever been in contact with positively diagnosed people, so that they could self…
Infectious diseases are caused by pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites or fungi, which can be spread, directly or indirectly, from one person to another. Infectious diseases pose a serious threat to human health, especially COVID-19 that has became a serious worldwide health concern since the end of 2019. Contact tracing is the process of identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to a disease to prevent its onward transmission. Contact tracing can help us better understand the transmission link of the virus, whereby better interrupting its tra…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Contact tracing is of paramount importance when it comes to preventing the spreading of infectious diseases. Contact tracing is usually performed manually by authorized personnel. Manual contact tracing is an inefficient, error-prone, time-consuming process of limited utility to the population at large as those in close contact with infected individuals are informed hours, if not days, later. This paper introduces an alternative way to manual contact tracing. The proposed Smart Contact Tracing (SCT) system utilizes the smartphone's Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals and machine learning classi…
Since the onset of the COVID-19's global spread we have been following the debate around contact tracing apps -- the tech-enabled response to the pandemic. As corporations, academics, governments, and civil society discuss the right way to implement these apps, we noticed recurring implicit assumptions. The proposed solutions are designed for a world where Internet access and smartphone ownership are a given, people are willing and able to install these apps, and those who receive notifications about potential exposure to the virus have access to testing and can isolate safely. In this work we…
For the protection of people and society against harm and health threats -- especially for the COVID-19 pandemic -- a variety of different disciplines needs to be involved. The data collection of very basic and health-related data of individuals in today's highly mobile society does help to plan, protect, and identify next steps health authorities and governments can, shall, or need to plan for or even implement. Thus, every individual, every human, and every inhabitant of the world is the key player -- very different to many past crises'. And since the individual is involved -- all individual…
A key characteristic of the spread of infectious diseases is their ability to use efficient transmission paths within contact graphs. This enables the pathogen to maximise infection rates and spread within a target population. In this work, we devise techniques to localise infections and decrease infection rates based on a principled analysis of disease transmission paths within human-contact networks (proximity graphs). Experimental results of disease spreading shows that that at low visibility rates contact tracing slows disease spreading. However to stop disease spreading, contact tracing r…
University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；Mila（米拉研究所）；The Alan Turing Institute（阿兰·图灵研究所）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Borden Ladner Gervais LLP（博登·拉德纳·热尔韦律师事务所）；The Decision Lab（决策实验室）；Max Planck Institute（马克斯·普朗克研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has caused significant strain on public health institutions around the world. Contact tracing is an essential tool to change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Manual contact tracing of Covid-19 cases has significant challenges that limit the ability of public health authorities to minimize community infections. Personalized peer-to-peer contact tracing through the use of mobile apps has the potential to shift the paradigm. Some countries have deployed centralized tracking systems, but more privacy-protecting decentralized systems offer much of the same ben…
Contact tracing is being widely employed to combat the spread of COVID-19. Many apps have been developed that allow for tracing to be done automatically based off location and interaction data generated by users. There are concerns, however, regarding the privacy and security of users data when using these apps. These concerns are paramount for users who contract the virus, as they are generally required to release all their data. Motivated by the need to protect users privacy we propose two solutions to this problem. Our first solution builds on current "message based" methods and our second …
Digital contact tracing has been proposed to support the health authorities in fighting the current Covid-19 pandemic. In this paper we propose two centralised protocols for digital contact tracing that, contrary to the common hypothesis that this is an inherent risk, do not allow (retroactive) tracking of the location of a device over time. The first protocol does not rely on synchronised clocks. The second protocol does not require a handshake between two devices, at the expense of relying on real-time communication with a central server. We stress that digital contact tracing is a form of t…
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a unique challenge for the world to find solutions, ranging from vaccines to ICT solutions to slow down the virus spreading. Due to the highly contagious nature of the virus, social distancing is one fundamental measure which has already adopted by many countries. At the technical level, this prioritises contact tracing solutions, which can alert the users who have been in close contact with the infected persons and meanwhile allow heath authorities to take proper actions. In this paper, we examine several existing privacy-aware contact tracing solutions and ana…
