WeTrace: A privacy-preserving tracing approach

For the protection of people and society against harmand health threats—especially in case of the COVID-19 pandemic— a variety of different disciplines needs to be involved. The datacollection of basic and health-related data of individuals in today’shighly mobile society does help to plan, protect, and identify nextsteps health authorities and governments can, shall, or need to planfor or even implement. Thus, every individual, human, and inhabitantof the world is the key player—very different from many pastcrises’. And since all individuals are involved his/her (a) health and(b) privacy shall be considered in a very carefully crafted balance,not overruling one aspect with another one. Privacy remains key. The solution of the current pandemic’s data collection can bebased on a fully privacy-preserving application, which can be usedby individuals on their mobile devices, such as smartphones, whilemaintaining at the same time their privacy. Additionally, respectivedata collected in such a fully distributed setting does help to confinethe pandemic and can be achieved in a democratic and very open,but still and especially privacy-protecting manner. Therefore, the WeTrace approach and application designed utilizesthe Bluetooth low energy (BLE) communication channel,many modern mobile devices offer, where public-key cryptographyis being applied to allow for deciphering of messages for that destinationit had been intended for. Since literally every other potentialparticipant only listens to random data, even a brute force attackwill not succeed. WeTrace and its Open Source implementation ensurethat any receiver of a message knows that this is for him/her,without being able to identify the original sender. KCI Citation Count: 0