A centralized contact-tracing protocol for the COVID-19 pandemic

Digital contact tracing (DCT) is one of the weapons to be used against the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in a post-lockdown phase, to prevent or block foci of infection. As DCT systems can handle highly private information about people, great care must be taken to prevent misuse of the system and actions detrimental to people’s privacy, up to mass surveillance. This paper presents a new centralized DCT protocol, called ZE2-P3T (Zero Ephemeral Exchanging Privacy-Preserving Proximity Protocol), which relies on smartphone localization but does not give any information about the user’s location and identity to the server. Importantly, the fact that no exchange of ephemeral identities among users is required is the basis of the strong security of the protocol, which is proven to be more secure than the state-of-the-art protocol DP-3T/GAEN.