Another Look at Privacy-Preserving Automated Contact Tracing

In the current COVID-19 pandemic, manual contact tracing has been proven to be very helpful to reach close contacts of infected users and slow down spread of the virus. To improve its scalability, a number of automated contact tracing (ACT) solutions have been proposed, and some of them have been deployed. Despite the dedicated efforts, security and privacy issues of these solutions are still open and under intensive debate. In this article, we examine the ACT concept from a broader perspective, by focusing on not only security and privacy issues but also functional issues such as interface, usability, and coverage. We first elaborate on these issues and particularly point out the inevitable privacy leakages in existing Bluetooth Low Energy based ACT solutions, including centralized and decentralized ones. In addition, we examine the existing venue-based ACT solutions and identify their privacy and security concerns. Then, we propose a generic venue-based ACT solution and a concrete instantiation based on Bluetooth Low Energy technology. Our solution monitors users’ contacting history only in virus-spreading-prone venues and offers higher-level protection for both security and privacy than its predecessors. Finally, we evaluate our solution from security, privacy, and efficiency perspectives, and also highlight how to reduce false positives in some specific indoor environments.

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A Survey of Automatic Contact Tracing Approaches Using Bluetooth Low Energy

ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare ◽

10.1145/3444847 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

pp. 1-33 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Leonie Reichert ◽

Samuel Brack ◽

BjÖRN Scheuermann

Keyword(s):

Low Energy ◽

Security And Privacy ◽

Contact Tracing ◽

Special Focus ◽

Bluetooth Low Energy ◽

Infected People ◽

Tracing Techniques

To combat the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, many new ways have been proposed on how to automate the process of finding infected people, also called contact tracing . A special focus was put on preserving the privacy of users. Bluetooth Low Energy as base technology has the most promising properties, so this survey focuses on automated contact tracing techniques using Bluetooth Low Energy. We define multiple classes of methods and identify two major groups: systems that rely on a server for finding new infections and systems that distribute this process. Existing approaches are systematically classified regarding security and privacy criteria.

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Sensing Street-level Crowd Density by Observing Public Bluetooth Low Energy Advertisements from Contact Tracing Applications

10.1109/isc253183.2021.9562964 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Masahiro Bessho ◽

Ken Sakamura

Keyword(s):

Low Energy ◽

Contact Tracing ◽

Bluetooth Low Energy ◽

Street Level ◽

Crowd Density

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Analysis of Bluetooth Low Energy Detection Range Improvements for Indoor Environments

Lecture Notes in Computer Science - Computational Science – ICCS 2018 ◽

10.1007/978-3-319-93713-7_56 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 598-609 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jay Pancham ◽

Richard Millham ◽

Simon James Fong

Keyword(s):

Energy Detection ◽

Low Energy ◽

Indoor Environments ◽

Detection Range ◽

Bluetooth Low Energy

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Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Security and Privacy

Encyclopedia of Wireless Networks ◽

10.1007/978-3-319-78262-1_298 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 123-134 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Yue Zhang ◽

Jian Weng ◽

Rajib Dey ◽

Xinwen Fu

Keyword(s):

Low Energy ◽

Security And Privacy ◽

Bluetooth Low Energy

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Security, Privacy, and Trust in Mobile Systems and Applications

Mobile and Wireless Systems Beyond 3G ◽

10.4018/978-1-59140-570-2.ch011 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 312-341 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Marco Cremonini ◽

Ernesto Damiani ◽

Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati ◽

Angelo Corallo ◽

Gianluca Elia

Keyword(s):

Information Security ◽

Mobile Systems ◽

Security And Privacy ◽

Privacy And Security ◽

Privacy Issues

Mobile systems and applications are raising some important information security and privacy issues. This chapter discusses the need for privacy and security in mobile systems and presents technological trends which highlight that this issue is of growing concern.

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A Survey of Authentication Schemes in the Internet of Things

International Journal of Smart Security Technologies ◽

10.4018/ijsst.2019010102 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 15-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Yasmine Labiod ◽

Abdelaziz Amara Korba ◽

Nacira Ghoualmi-Zine

Keyword(s):

Internet Of Things ◽

Security Requirements ◽

Security And Privacy ◽

The Internet ◽

Privacy And Security ◽

Depth Study ◽

Authentication Schemes ◽

Iot Devices ◽

Privacy Issues ◽

The Internet Of Things

In the recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely deployed in different daily life aspects such as home automation, electronic health, the electric grid, etc. Nevertheless, the IoT paradigm raises major security and privacy issues. To secure the IoT devices, many research works have been conducted to counter those issues and discover a better way to remove those risks, or at least reduce their effects on the user's privacy and security requirements. This article mainly focuses on a critical review of the recent authentication techniques for IoT devices. First, this research presents a taxonomy of the current cryptography-based authentication schemes for IoT. In addition, this is followed by a discussion of the limitations, advantages, objectives, and attacks supported of current cryptography-based authentication schemes. Finally, the authors make in-depth study on the most relevant authentication schemes for IoT in the context of users, devices, and architecture that are needed to secure IoT environments and that are needed for improving IoT security and items to be addressed in the future.

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A survey on fog computing: research challenges in security and privacy issues

International Journal of Engineering & Technology ◽

10.14419/ijet.v7i2.7.10710 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 7 (2.7) ◽

pp. 335 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

T Veerraju ◽

Dr K. Kiran Kumar

Keyword(s):

Fog Computing ◽

Cloud Services ◽

Security And Privacy ◽

Limited Resources ◽

Privacy And Security ◽

Computing Paradigm ◽

Is Security ◽

Real Time Applications ◽

And Storage ◽

Privacy Issues

With the rapid advancement of Internet of Things has enabled to combine the intercommunication and interconnection between seamless networks. Cloud computing provides backend solutions and one among the most prominent technologies for the users, still cannot be solved all the problems such as latency of real time applications. However, a new computing paradigm comes in to the picture. Many of the researchers focused on this exemplar known as Fog/Edge computing, which has been planned to the extension of cloud services. Fog provides the services to the edge of the networks, which makes communication, computation and storage for end users through fog devices and for servers like controllers. We analyze the study, which aims to augment low bandwidth, latency along with the privacy and security. The major problem in the Fog computing is security due to the limited resources. In this paper, we investigated the protection issues and confrontation of Fog and also provide countermeasures on security for different attacks. We focused the future security directions and challenges to address in fog networks.

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Feature selection for proximity estimation in COVID-19 contact tracing apps based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

Pervasive and Mobile Computing ◽

10.1016/j.pmcj.2021.101474 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 101474

Author(s):

Pablo G. Madoery ◽

Ramiro Detke ◽

Lucas Blanco ◽

Sandro Comerci ◽

Juan Fraire ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Feature Selection ◽

Low Energy ◽

Contact Tracing ◽

Bluetooth Low Energy ◽

Selection For

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A Robust Indoor Positioning Method based on Bluetooth Low Energy with Separate Channel Information

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s19163487 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 19 (16) ◽

pp. 3487 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Baichuan Huang ◽

Jingbin Liu ◽

Wei Sun ◽

Fan Yang

Keyword(s):

Indoor Positioning ◽

Low Energy ◽

Indoor Environments ◽

Positioning Error ◽

Decision Strategy ◽

Signal Attenuation ◽

Optimal Position ◽

Bluetooth Low Energy ◽

A Value ◽

Attenuation Models

Among the current indoor positioning technologies, Bluetooth low energy (BLE) has gained increasing attention. In particular, the traditional distance estimation derived from aggregate RSS and signal-attenuation models is generally unstable because of the complicated interference in indoor environments. To improve the adaptability and robustness of the BLE positioning system, we propose making full use of the three separate channels of BLE instead of their combination, which has generally been used before. In the first step, three signal-attenuation models are separately established for each BLE advertising channel in the offline phase, and a more stable distance in the online phase can be acquired by assembling measurements from all three channels with the distance decision strategy. Subsequently, a weighted trilateration method with uncertainties related to the distances derived in the first step is proposed to determine the user’s optimal position. The test results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm for determining the distance error achieves a value of less than 2.2 m at 90%, while for the positioning error, it achieves a value of less than 2.4 m at 90%. Compared with the traditional methods, the positioning error of our method is reduced by 33% to 38% for different smartphones and scenarios.

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