IoTrace: A Flexible, Efficient, and Privacy-Preserving IoT-enabled Architecture for Contact Tracing
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Contact tracing promises to help fight the diffusion of Covid-19 via an early detection of possible sources of further contagion. A number of applications have been proposed to this aim. All of them have in common the underlying architecture: smartphones transmit their own beacons, while at the same time storing the beacons sent by other devices—with a reconciliation procedure applied later on. On top of this, solutions are adopted to provide some privacy guarantees to the users. In this paper, we relax the smartphone-centric assumption, and propose an IoT-enabled architecture for contact tracing that enjoys the following features: i) it reduces the overhead on the end-user to the bare minimum—it requires the mobile phone to only broadcast its beacons; ii) it provides the user with a degree of privacy not achieved by competing solutions—even in the most privacy adverse scenario, the solution provides k-anonymity; and, iii) it is tunable: the very same architecture can be configured to support several models, ranging from the fully decentralized to the fully centralized ones. Finally, we also highlight open issues and future directions. We believe that the novelty of the proposal, as well as its striking properties and flexibility, has the potential to pave the way for further research.
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