The TraceCORONA platform concept for pandemic response is built around a core app for digital contact tracing, but aims at providing a comprehensive solution for major aspects that are important for helping users cope with issues related to the pandemic.
TraceCORONA Addresses User Needs
- Anonymity without compromises: The TraceCORONA App captures contacts between users in a completely decentralised and anonymous manner using cryptographic Encounter Tokens instead of short-lived pseudonyms. This provides an unmatched level of anonymity and privacy to its users.
- Secure messaging with health experts and organisations: TraceCORONA offers the possibility for users communicate securely and privately with doctors or healthcare experts to get answers to their concrete situation, e.g., with regard to self-isolation measures to be taken or participate anonymously in pandemic-related surveys. For example, colleagues in Spain obtained in a very short time more than 140000 responses to an online survey, allowing them to make extremely interesting findings about the dynamics and societal impact of the pandemic.
- Prevention of Fake News: Misinformation can provoke panic and unjustified fear among the population, which is an ever-increasing problem, as pointed out by an open letter by numerous health professionals published recently in The New York Times. Through the integrated trusted browser in TraceCORONA, users can have direct access to information about the pandemic originating from reliable sources, thus mitigating the harmful effects of the ‘Infodemic’ caused by the spreading of Fake News.
- Interoperability: Other applications (including other Tracing Apps) can dock onto the secure communication platform of TraceCORONA, providing also the possibility to operate across national borders.
Secure and Privacy-Preserving Pandemic Tracing and Information Platform
TraceCORONA is designed to be not only a tracing app, but a system concept that allows the TraceCORONA tracing component as well as other possible tracing apps to integrate into a secure health platform for private healthcare-related services over a well-defined secure interface.
At the core of the TraceCORONA design is the TraceCORONA App, which enables the anonymous and decentralised tracing of contacts between users and allows users to determine whether they have had a contact with an infected person. The advantage of the app is that tracing happens anonymously: the backend components receive no information that would enable them to trace contacts. This is possible only for the devices actually involved in the contact between users and provides thus a maximal level of privacy for the users. For a description of how the TraceCORONA App works, please see here.
The TraceCORONA system concept is based on an existing security platform that has been deployed for many years and is being commercially used for high-security applications like on-line banking mobile apps or personal health insurance apps.
Using the TraceCORONA secure health service platform, users can opt-in to many useful services allowing confidential and trustworthy interactions with healthcare providers, testing centres, health authorities, hospitals and other comparable entities. These services will be implemented using the secure messaging / chat, secure document exchange and secure health process capabilities provided by the platform.
Contact
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi
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