PPContactTracing: A Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing Protocol for COVID-19 Pandemic
This addresses privacy concerns in contact tracing for public health during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is incremental as it builds on existing cryptographic methods.
The paper tackles the problem of contact tracing for COVID-19 by proposing a privacy-preserving protocol based on private set intersection and homomorphic encryption, achieving efficient tracing while protecting individual privacy.
Several contact tracing solutions have been proposed and implemented all around the globe to combat the spread of COVID-19 pandemic. But, most of these solutions endanger the privacy rights of the individuals and hinder their widespread adoption. We propose a privacy-preserving contact tracing protocol for the efficient tracing of the spread of the global pandemic. It is based on the private set intersection (PSI) protocol and utilizes the homomorphic properties to preserve the privacy at the individual level. A hierarchical model for the representation of landscapes and rate-limiting factor on the number of queries have been adopted to maintain the efficiency of the protocol.