Demystifying COVID-19 digital contact tracing: A survey on frameworks and mobile apps
This survey addresses the need for a unified understanding of contact tracing frameworks for researchers and policymakers, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing work without introducing new methods.
The paper provides a comprehensive review of digital contact tracing architectures and mobile apps developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on Bluetooth Low Energy technologies and categorizing systems as centralized, decentralized, or hybrid, while also analyzing deployed apps in Europe and presenting an adversary model.
The coronavirus pandemic is a new reality and it severely affects the modus vivendi of the international community. In this context, governments are rushing to devise or embrace novel surveillance mechanisms and monitoring systems to fight the outbreak. The development of digital tracing apps, which among others are aimed at automatising and globalising the prompt alerting of individuals at risk in a privacy-preserving manner is a prominent example of this ongoing effort. Very promptly, a number of digital contact tracing architectures has been sprouted, followed by relevant app implementations adopted by governments worldwide. Bluetooth, and specifically its Low Energy (BLE) power-conserving variant has emerged as the most promising short-range wireless network technology to implement the contact tracing service. This work offers the first to our knowledge, full-fledged review of the most concrete contact tracing architectures proposed so far in a global scale. This endeavour does not only embrace the diverse types of architectures and systems, namely centralised, decentralised, or hybrid, but it equally addresses the client side, i.e., the apps that have been already deployed in Europe by each country. There is also a full-spectrum adversary model section, which does not only amalgamate the previous work in the topic, but also brings new insights and angles to contemplate upon.