2020/05/20 by Francesco Buccafurri, Buccafurri, Francesco, Vincenzo De Angelis +3
Computer Science · Engineering · Social Sciences · #COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.10309
openalex publication_date 2020/05/20 · openalex created_date 2022/07/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Digital contact tracing is one of the actions useful, in combination with\nother measures, to manage an epidemic diffusion of an infection disease in an\nafter-lock-down phase. This is a very timely issue, due to the pandemic of\nCOVID-19 we are unfortunately living. Apps for contact tracing aim to detect\nproximity of users and to evaluate the related risk in terms of possible\ncontagious. Existing approaches leverage Bluetooth or GPS, or their\ncombination, even though the prevailing approach is Bluetooth-based and relies\non a decentralized model requiring the mutual exchange of ephemeral identifiers\namong users' smartphones. Unfortunately, a number of security and privacy\nconcerns exist in this kind of solutions, mainly due to the exchange of\nidentifiers, while GPS-based solutions (inherently centralized) may suffer from\nthreats concerning massive surveillance. In this paper, we propose a solution\nleveraging GPS to detect proximity, and Bluetooth only to improve accuracy,\nwithout enabling exchange of identifiers. Unlike related existing solutions, no\ncomplex cryptographic mechanism is adopted, while ensuring that the server does\nnot learn anything about locations of users.\n