Digital Contact Tracing Service: An improved decentralized design for privacy and effectiveness

We propose a decentralized digital contact tracing service that preserves the users' privacy by design while complying to the highest security standards. Our approach is based on Bluetooth and measures actual encounters of people, the contact time period, and estimates the proximity of the contact. We trace the users' contacts and the possible spread of infectious diseases while preventing location tracking of users, protecting their data and identity. We verify and improve the impact of tracking based on epidemiological models. We compare a centralized and decentralized approach on a legal perspective and find a decentralized approach preferable considering proportionality and data minimization.

[1]  Tsuyoshi Murata,et al.  {m , 1934, ACML.

[2]  Nick Mathewson,et al.  Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router , 2004, USENIX Security Symposium.

[3]  Daniel Kales,et al.  Mobile Private Contact Discovery at Scale , 2019, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[5]  Christiane Kuhn,et al.  Covid notions: Towards formal definitions – and documented understanding – of privacy goals and claimed protection in proximity-tracing services , 2020, Online Social Networks and Media.

[6]  G. Chowell,et al.  Estimating the Asymptomatic Proportion of 2019 Novel Coronavirus onboard the Princess Cruises Ship, 2020 , 2020, medRxiv.

[7]  Dawn Song,et al.  Epione: Lightweight Contact Tracing with Strong Privacy , 2020, IEEE Data Eng. Bull..

[8]  M. Wang,et al.  Epidemiological parameters of coronavirus disease 2019: a pooled analysis of publicly reported individual data of 1155 cases from seven countries , 2020, medRxiv.

[9]  Xiaoyan Liu,et al.  Unbalanced private set intersection cardinality protocol with low communication cost , 2020, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[10]  Antoine Boutet,et al.  ROBERT: ROBust and privacy-presERving proximity Tracing , 2020 .

[11]  Martin E. Hellman,et al.  An improved algorithm for computing logarithms over GF(p) and its cryptographic significance (Corresp.) , 1978, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[12]  S. Ciesek,et al.  SARS‐CoV‐2 asymptomatic and symptomatic patients and risk for transfusion transmission , 2020, medRxiv.

[13]  N. Linton,et al.  Estimation of the asymptomatic ratio of novel coronavirus infections (COVID-19) , 2020, International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

[14]  Mark Zastrow,et al.  South Korea is reporting intimate details of COVID-19 cases: has it helped? , 2020, Nature.

[15]  P. Vollmar,et al.  Transmission of 2019-nCoV Infection from an Asymptomatic Contact in Germany , 2020, The New England journal of medicine.

[16]  Samarjit Chakraborty,et al.  How Reliable is Smartphone-based Electronic Contact Tracing for COVID-19? , 2020, ArXiv.