Bluetooth-based COVID-19 Proximity Tracing Proposals: An Overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews Bluetooth-based COVID-19 proximity tracing proposals, comparing their workflows, design features, privacy goals, and analyzing their strengths and weaknesses to inform future developments.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview and comparison of five Bluetooth-based COVID-19 tracing proposals, highlighting their design features and privacy considerations.

Findings

Different proposals use centralized or decentralized architectures.

Security and privacy goals vary across proposals.

Open problems include improving privacy and accuracy.

Abstract

Large-scale COVID-19 infections have occurred worldwide, which has caused tremendous impact on the economy and people's lives. The traditional method for tracing contagious virus, for example, determining the infection chain according to the memory of infected people, has many drawbacks. With the continuous spread of the pandemic, many countries or organizations have started to study how to use mobile devices to trace COVID-19, aiming to help people automatically record information about incidents with infected people through technologies, reducing the manpower required to determine the infection chain and alerting people at risk of infection. This article gives an overview on various Bluetooth-based COVID-19 proximity tracing proposals including centralized and decentralized proposals. We discussed the basic workflow and the differences between them before providing a survey of five typical proposals with explanations of their design features and benefits. Then, we summarized eight security and privacy design goals for Bluetooth-based COVID-19 proximity tracing proposals and applied them to analyze the five proposals. Finally, open problems and future directions are discussed.