Rendezvous based pandemic tracing by sharing Diffie-Hellman generated common secrets

There is an urgent need to shorten the period of the current economic slowdown, caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 pandemic.

In order to prevent new outbreaks, it is essential to trace potential carriers of the virus. For this purpose, mobile technologies provide the most prominent solution, since mobile devices are typically present, where viruses are transmitted in human-human encounters.

In this white paper we propose a method that keeps users persistently unidentified. Consequently, there is no kind of a registration (no mobile number or other persistent identifier), that could introduce privacy issues.

Instead of having focus on people, the proposal has a focus on individual encounters, rendezvouses; hence the name 'Rendezvous Based Tracing’.

Being authority-less, this proposal will address some obvious drawbacks of distributed solutions proposed this far, providing data for spatiotemporal analytics of viral transmission, while not making any compromises on actual alerting.

However, it is essential that a single solution becomes adopted within regions where people commute or travel. The presented approach shares common elements with Identity Based methods. Therefore, the authors will continue their work by examining possibilities for integration, especially with PEPP-PT.