Enabling privacy-preserving digital contact tracing

Date: 9/9/21, 3-4 AEST

Speaker: Nadeem Ahmed

Title: Enabling privacy-preserving digital contact tracing

Recording: https://webcast.csiro.au/#/videos/4a7d62ac-f0aa-4141-97dc-be6fbfcde84a

Abstract: Several digital contact tracing apps have been proposed and deployed to supplement the traditional manual contact tracing process. However, these suffer from poor adoption rates due to apprehensions surrounding data privacy. We present a privacy-preserving contact tracing protocol, ”Did I Meet You” (DIMY). The protocol provides full-lifecycle data privacy protection on the devices and the backend to address most of the privacy concerns associated with existing protocols. We have employed Bloom filters to provide efficient privacy-preserving storage and have used the Diffie-Hellman key exchange for secret sharing among the participants. For the backend, DIMY utilises blockchain to satisfy the immutable and decentralised storage requirement. We show that DIMY provides resilience against many well-known attacks while introducing negligible overheads. DIMY has a significantly lower footprint on the storage space of clients’ devices and the backend compared with other state-of-the-art apps.

Bio: Nadeem Ahmed is a senior research fellow with CSCRC at University of New South Wales. He received his PhD degree in computer science and engineering from UNSW. He has previously worked as post doc fellow on a DSTO funded project on detection and tracking using off-the-shelf wireless sensor networks, and ARC grant on aerial wireless sensor networks. His research interests include network security, wireless sensor networks, software defined networking and cloud computing.