Privacy Guarantees of BLE Contact Tracing: A Case Study on COVIDWISE
This provides crucial validation for health authorities adopting contact tracing technology, addressing privacy and security concerns to enhance user trust.
The researchers analyzed the security, privacy, and reliability of Google and Apple's exposure notification technology for contact tracing, focusing on Virginia's COVIDWISE app, and validated its properties under realistic conditions.
Google and Apple jointly introduced a digital contact tracing technology and an API called "exposure notification," to help health organizations and governments with contact tracing. The technology and its interplay with security and privacy constraints require investigation. In this study, we examine and analyze the security, privacy, and reliability of the technology with actual and typical scenarios (and expected typical adversary in mind), and quite realistic use cases. We do it in the context of Virginia's COVIDWISE app. This experimental analysis validates the properties of the system under the above conditions, a result that seems crucial for the peace of mind of the exposure notification technology adopting authorities, and may also help with the system's transparency and overall user trust.