Bluetooth-based COVID-19 Proximity Tracing Proposals: An Overview
This work addresses the need for automated contact tracing to reduce manual efforts and alert at-risk individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is incremental as it surveys existing proposals.
The paper provides an overview of Bluetooth-based COVID-19 proximity tracing proposals, comparing centralized and decentralized approaches and analyzing five typical proposals against eight security and privacy design goals.
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.