IoTrace: A Flexible, Efficient, and Privacy-Preserving IoT-Enabled Architecture for Contact Tracing

Contact tracing promises to help fight the spread of COVID–19 via an early detection of possible contagion events. To this end, most existing solutions share the following architecture: smartphones continuously broadcast random beacons that are intercepted by nearby devices and stored into their local contact logs. In this article, we propose an IoT-enabled architecture for contact tracing that relaxes the smartphone-centric assumption, and provides a solution that enjoys the following features: it reduces the overhead on the end user to the bare minimum - the mobile device only broadcasts its beacons; it provides the user with a degree of privacy not achieved by competing solutions - even in the most privacy adverse scenario, the solution provides $k$-anonymity; and it is flexible: the same architecture can be configured to support several models - ranging from fully decentralized to fully centralized ones - and the system parameters can be tuned to support the tracing of several social interaction models. What is more, our proposal can also be adopted to tackle future human-proximity transmissible diseases. Finally, we also highlight open issues and discuss a number of future research directions at the intersection of IoT and contact tracing.