SafeTrace Heatmap

Background

Contact-tracing is the use of information about where an individual has been, and who they may have come into contact with, as a way to track and manage the spread of viruses. This technique has been used in recent history to track and contain viruses like Ebola and COVID-19. The proliferation of smartphones provides a ready source of highly detailed information that can be used in contact-tracing. While many contact-tracing applications exist, they face two problems:

1. User Data Privacy: Contact-tracing relies on accurate and granular data about the user’s location and proximity to other users. Whether this is location data, bluetooth data, or other information, this type of data is used in conjunction with a user's infection status to determine their risk level. Collecting this type of information about users places a significant data security burden on whatever organization is gathering the data or has access to it.
2. Data Silos: Contact tracing apps must have extremely good coverage within a population to be effective. If the many different applications that provide this service cannot share information between one-another, effectiveness is limited. However, if they do share information, privacy concerns are even more pronounced. Recently EU Data Protection Supervisor called for a single EU-wide application rather than having each national tools that create data silos

SafeTrace API

SafeTrace is intended to address both these concerns. SafeTrace is an API which connects to a privacy-preserving storage and private computation service.

This means that many different applications (such as a web application or a mobile application) can submit encrypted user data via the SafeTrace API and receive results, without ever revealing plaintext data to anyone, including the SafeTrace server operator. This relies on Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), a technology for preserving data privacy while data is in-use. Then, SafeTrace can produce two types of reports-- individual and global-- based on the aggregate data submitted by all applications. In this way, SafeTrace can be used to overcome both privacy concerns and data silo problems for contact-tracing.

Built With

• intel-sgx
• mongodb
• react
• rust