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Privacy-preserving identity broadcast for contact tracing applications

  • Vladimir Dyo
    ,
  • Jahangir Ali
  • University of Bedfordshire
Research Output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Conference contribution Peer-review

Open access

Abstract

Wireless Contact tracing has emerged as an important tool for managing the COVID19 pandemic and relies on continuous broadcasting of a person’s presence using Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. The limitation of current contact tracing systems in that a reception of a single beacon is sufficient to reveal the user identity, potentially exposing users to malicious trackers installed along the roads, passageways, and other infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a method based on Shamir secret sharing algorithm, which lets mobile nodes reveal their identity only after a certain predefined contact duration, remaining invisible to trackers with short or fleeting encounters. Through data-driven evaluation, using a dataset containing 18 million BLE sightings, we show that the method drastically reduces the privacy exposure of users. Finally, we implemented the approach on Android phones to demonstrate its feasibility and measure performance for various network densities.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Conference contribution Peer-review

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 1-6

Publication milestones

  • Published - 10/08/2021

Publication status

Published - 10/08/2021

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., United States

Publication series

  • Publication series name: IFIP Wireless Days
    ISSN (Print): 2156-9711
    ISSN (Electronic): 2156-972X
    Volume: 2021-June

ISBN (Print)

9781665425605

ISBN (Electronic)

9781665425599

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/625083
  • Scopus: 85121961235

Host publication title

Proceedings - 12th Wireless Days Conference, WD 2021

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