WeTrace -- A Privacy-preserving Mobile COVID-19 Tracing Approach and Application

Abstract: For the protection of people and society against harm and health threats -- especially for the COVID-19 pandemic -- a variety of different disciplines needs to be involved. The data collection of very basic and health-related data of individuals in today's highly mobile society does help to plan, protect, and identify next steps health authorities and governments can, shall, or need to plan for or even implement. Thus, every individual, every human, and every inhabitant of the world is the key player -- very different to many past crises'. And since the individual is involved -- all individuals -- his/her (a) health and (b) privacy shall be considered in a very carefully crafted balance, not overruling one aspect with another one or even prioritizing certain aspects. Privacy remains the key. Thus, the solution of the current pandemic's data collection can be based on a fully privacy-preserving application, which can be used by individuals on their mobile devices, such as smartphones, while maintaining at the same time their privacy. Additionally, respective data collected in such a fully distributed setting does help to confine the pandemic and can be achieved in a democratic and very open, but still and especially privacy-protecting world. Therefore, the WeTrace approach and application as described in this paper utilizes the Bluetooth Low Energy (BTE) communication channel, many modern mobile devices offer, where asymmetric cryptography is being applied to allows for the decyphering of a message for that destination it had been intended for. Since literally every other potential participant only listens to random data, even a brute force attack will not succeed. WeTrace and its Open Source implementation is the only known approach so far, which ensures that any receiver of a message knows that this is for him/her, but does not know who the original sender was.