DP-ACT: Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Asymmetric Digital Contact Tracing
Authors: Azra Abtahi (Lund University), Mathias Payer (EPFL), Amir Aminifar (Lund University)
Volume: 2024
Issue: 1
Pages: 330–342
DOI: https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2024-0019
Abstract: Digital contact tracing substantially improves the identification of high-risk contacts during pandemics. Despite several attempts to encourage people to use digital contact-tracing applications by developing and rolling out decentralized privacy-preserving protocols (broadcasting pseudo-random IDs over Bluetooth Low Energy---BLE), the adoption of digital contact tracing mobile applications has been limited, with privacy being one of the main concerns. In this paper, we propose a decentralized privacy-preserving contact tracing protocol, called DP-ACT, with both active and passive participants. Active participants broadcast BLE beacons with pseudo-random IDs, while passive participants model conservative users who do not broadcast BLE beacons but still listen to the broadcasted BLE beacons. We analyze the proposed protocol and discuss a set of interesting properties. The proposed protocol is evaluated using both a face-to-face individual interaction dataset and five real-world BLE datasets. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DP-ACT protocol outperforms the state-of-the-art protocols in the presence of passive users.
Keywords: Proximity Tracing, Digital Contact Tracing, COVID-19, Internet of Things (IoT), Privacy, Decentralized, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Mobile Apps, DP-3T, PEPP-PT
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