Privacy-Oriented Technique for COVID-19 Contact Tracing (PROTECT) Using Homomorphic Encryption: Design and Development Study.

Publisher: JMIR Publications Country of Publication: Canada NLM ID: 100959882 Publication Model: Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1438-8871 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 14388871 NLM ISO Abbreviation: J Med Internet Res Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: <2011- > : Toronto : JMIR Publications
Original Publication: [Pittsburgh, PA? : s.n., 1999-

Computer Security*/ethics ; Computer Security*/standards ; Patient Rights* ; Privacy*; COVID-19/*diagnosis ; Contact Tracing/*ethics ; Contact Tracing/*methods; Biomedical Technology/ethics ; Biomedical Technology/methods ; COVID-19/epidemiology ; Confidentiality ; Humans ; Mobile Applications ; Pandemics ; Quarantine ; SARS-CoV-2

Background: Various techniques are used to support contact tracing, which has been shown to be highly effective against the COVID-19 pandemic. To apply the technology, either quarantine authorities should provide the location history of patients with COVID-19, or all users should provide their own location history. This inevitably exposes either the patient's location history or the personal location history of other users. Thus, a privacy issue arises where the public good (via information release) comes in conflict with privacy exposure risks.
Objective: The objective of this study is to develop an effective contact tracing system that does not expose the location information of the patient with COVID-19 to other users of the system, or the location information of the users to the quarantine authorities.
Methods: We propose a new protocol called PRivacy Oriented Technique for Epidemic Contact Tracing (PROTECT) that securely shares location information of patients with users by using the Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren homomorphic encryption scheme, along with a new, secure proximity computation method.
Results: We developed a mobile app for the end-user and a web service for the quarantine authorities by applying the proposed method, and we verified their effectiveness. The proposed app and web service compute the existence of intersections between the encrypted location history of patients with COVID-19 released by the quarantine authorities and that of the user saved on the user's local device. We also found that this contact tracing smartphone app can identify whether the user has been in contact with such patients within a reasonable time.
Conclusions: This newly developed method for contact tracing shares location information by using homomorphic encryption, without exposing the location information of patients with COVID-19 and other users. Homomorphic encryption is challenging to apply to practical issues despite its high security value. In this study, however, we have designed a system using the Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren scheme that is applicable to a reasonable size and developed it to an operable format. The developed app and web service can help contact tracing for not only the COVID-19 pandemic but also other epidemics.
(©Yongdae An, Seungmyung Lee, Seungwoo Jung, Howard Park, Yongsoo Song, Taehoon Ko. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 12.07.2021.)

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Keywords: COVID-19; GPS data; PROTECT protocol; homomorphic encryption; mobile application; privacy-preserving contact tracing; web service

Date Created: 20210517 Date Completed: 20210720 Latest Revision: 20210727

20221213

PMC8276784

10.2196/26371

33999829