A Fully Distributed, Privacy Respecting Approach for Back-tracking of Potentially Infectious Contacts

TL;DR

This paper proposes a fully distributed, privacy-preserving mobile device-based contact tracing method to quickly identify and alert potentially infected individuals, aiding in controlling disease spread while safeguarding user privacy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized contact tracing approach that balances effective infection tracking with strong privacy protections.

Findings

Ensures high privacy preservation during contact tracing.

Provides rapid identification of potential infection contacts.

Supports defense against malicious data usage.

Abstract

In limiting the rapid spread of highly infectious diseases like Covid-19 means to immediately identify individuals who had been in contact with a newly diagnosed infected person have proven to be important. Such potential victims can go into quarantine until tested thus constraining further spread. This note describes a concept of mobile device (e.g. Smart phones) based approach for tracking interpersonal contacts which might have led to infection and alerting the potential victims. The approach assures means for defense against malicious usage while assuring a high level of privacy for all people involved.