Digital Contact Tracing Solutions: Promises, Pitfalls and Challenges

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many countries to deploy novel digital contact tracing (DCT) systems to boost the efficiency of manual tracing of infection chains. In this paper, we systematically analyze DCT solutions and categorize them based on their design approaches and architectures. We analyze them with regard to effectiveness, security, privacy and ethical aspects and compare prominent solutions with regard to these requirements. In particular, we discuss shortcomings of the Google and Apple Exposure Notification API (GAEN) that is currently widely adopted all over the world. We find that the security and privacy of GAEN has considerable deficiencies as it can be compromised by severe large-scale attacks.We also discuss other proposed approaches for contact tracing, including our proposal TRACECORONA, that are based on Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange and aim at tackling shortcomings of existing solutions. Our extensive analysis shows that TRACECORONA fulfills the above security requirements better than deployed state-of-the-art approaches. We have implemented TRACECORONA and its beta test version has been used by more than 2000 users without any major functional problems 1 , demonstrating that there are no technical reasons requiring to make compromises with regard to the requirements of DCT approaches.

Contact Tracing Over Uncertain Indoor Positioning Data

“…Contact Tracing. There are two mainstream contact tracing technologies, namely proximity-based solutions [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29] and location-based solutions [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [21].…”

“…Relying on wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, the proximity-based contact tracing solutions regard two devices as close contacts of each other if one of them falls within the wireless detection range of the other for a certain time period. Some studies review and compare proximitybased contact tracing methods, from the perspectives of system design [27], [28], privacy issues [29], and future development [25], [26]. Some recent representative works are introduced below.…”