COVID-19 Contact-tracing Apps: a Survey on the Global Deployment and Challenges

TL;DR

This survey reviews global COVID-19 contact-tracing app deployments, analyzing architectures, technologies, vulnerabilities, and future research directions, with a focus on decentralized Bluetooth-based solutions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review and geolocation mapping of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps, highlighting deployment frameworks, underlying technologies, and research challenges.

Findings

Decentralized Bluetooth apps are prominent in current deployments.

Vulnerabilities include privacy and security concerns.

Research is focusing on improving privacy-preserving mechanisms.

Abstract

To address the massive spike in uncertainties triggered by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), there is an ever-increasing number of national governments that are rolling out contact-tracing Apps to aid the containment of the virus. The first hugely contentious issue facing the Apps is the deployment framework, i.e. centralized or decentralized. Based on this, the debate branches out to the corresponding technologies that underpin these architectures, i.e. GPS, QR codes, and Bluetooth. This work conducts a pioneering review of the above scenarios and contributes a geolocation mapping of the current deployment. The Apps vulnerabilities and the directions of research are identified, with a special focus on the Bluetooth-inspired decentralized paradigm.