Toward a secure global contact tracing app for Covid-19

Abstract

The outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic has devastated many sectors of each country and led to the development of contact tracing applications for controlling its spread. Contact tracing apps have been promoted to track infected contacts. However, contact tracing has gained significant debate due to its security and privacy concerns. The goal of this study is to examine the most popular contact tracing apps, their impact on pandemic control, as well security and privacy concerns. The multivocal literature review (MLR) brings the results from the state-of-the-art literature. We extracted 23 studies from both formal and grey literature to achieve the research objectives and found several security and privacy threats in the existing contact tracing applications. Additionally, the best practices to address these threats were also identified. We further proposed a preliminary structure of a secure global contact tracing app using blockchain technology.

Personal Data Privacy vs Public Interest

“…[29] In China, ""personal data" means any information recorded by electronic or other means related to identified or identifiable natural persons, not including information after anonymisation." [30] Within the definition of personal data, there is a special category, namely sensitive personal data ("SPD") related to all Covid-19 apps (e.g., health data [31]), which in general shall be prohibited from processing [32] unless "processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest" [33], or can only be processed "when there is a specific purpose and sufficient necessity, and strict protection measures are taken". [34] However, the definition of the SPD has not been provided by the EU/UK GDPR, or China PIPL, apart from a list of SPD examples.…”

Fenrir: Blockchain-Based Inter-Company App-Store for the Automotive Industry

“…Therefore, the background study presented in this section justifies the choices proposed in our study (cf., V), which we believe to offer an improved collaborative software deployment framework for the automotive context. Furthermore, note that this migration through blockchain-based solutions to enhance the system traceability and data integrity has also started in other related sectors such as eHealth [28], [29] and Industry 4.0 [30].…”

Security in Wireless Body Sensor Network: A Multivocal Literature Study

“…The authors only focus on BSN routing protocols and ignore the authentication scheme. The authors of [23] aim to convey the latest advances in various facets of wireless body area sensor networks, including communication structures, WBASN applications, coding frameworks, security concerns, and energy-efficient routing algorithms. They attempted to cover the most recent advances, while also discussing the radio channel technologies for these networks.…”