Original Research Article
Year: 2021 | Month: April | Volume: 11 | Issue: 4 | Pages: 1-11
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijhsr.20210401
COVID-19 Contact Tracing Applications: Design and Operations
Pulkit Verma1, Neeraj Kumar2
1Scientist ‘C’, BMI Division, Indian Council of Medical Research, Room No. 118, V. Ramalingaswami Bhawan, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi-110029
2Technical Officer, BMI Division, Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi
Corresponding Author: Pulkit Verma
ABSTRACT
The Digital footprint we create in our modern lives through hour handheld devices and wearable gadgets is enormous. It was little known that, in the light of the recent outburst of the pandemic, this digital footprint would play an important role in contact tracing of the infected patients. This digital encounter tracing came into existence in order to relieve the Heath Authorities from the burden of manually tracking the contacts. Different countries developed a number of contact tracing apps based on the different architectures for the same purpose. This paper analyses the different intricacies of the architectures currently in use from the perspective of information storage, division of processing, capabilities and possible security concerns. Effort has been made in order to touch upon the possible attacks in each of the architectures. The paper concludes with the future research efforts in possible optimization of the architecture and the protocols, which in turn may lead to better contact tracing and containment of pandemic.
Key words: Digital Proximity, Contact Tracing, Bluetooth, GPS, DP, encryption, Anonymized, Decentralized, Open Source, PACT, DESIRE.