DIMY: Enabling privacy-preserving contact tracing

Nadeem Ahmed; Regio A Michelin; Wanli Xue; Guntur Dharma Putra; Sushmita Ruj; Salil S Kanhere; Sanjay Jha

doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2022.103356

DIMY: Enabling privacy-preserving contact tracing

J Netw Comput Appl. 2022 Jun:202:103356. doi: 10.1016/j.jnca.2022.103356. Epub 2022 Mar 26.

Authors

Nadeem Ahmed^{1

2}, Regio A Michelin^{1

2}, Wanli Xue^{1

2}, Guntur Dharma Putra^{1

2}, Sushmita Ruj³, Salil S Kanhere^{1

2}, Sanjay Jha^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC), 6027, Perth, Australia.
² The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Anzac Parade, Kensignton, 2052, Sydney, Australia.
³ CSIRO, DATA61, Marsfield, 2122, Sydney, Australia.

Abstract

The infection rate of COVID-19 and the rapid mutation ability of the virus has forced governments and health authorities to adopt lockdowns, increased testing, and contact tracing to reduce the virus's spread. Digital contact tracing has become a supplement to the traditional manual contact tracing process. However, although several digital contact tracing apps are proposed and deployed, these have not been widely adopted due to apprehensions surrounding privacy and security. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based privacy-preserving contact tracing protocol,"Did I Meet You" (DIMY). The protocol provides full-lifecycle data privacy protection on the devices as well as the back-end servers 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. We show that DIMY provides resilience against many well-known attacks while introducing negligible overheads. DIMY's footprint on the storage space of clients' devices and back-end servers is also significantly lower than other similar state-of-the-art apps.

Keywords: Blockchain; Bloom filter; COVID-19; Contact tracing; Privacy; Security.