Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing

This repository contains a proposal for a secure and privacy-preserving decentralized privacy-preserving proximity tracing system. Its goal is to simplify and accelerate the process of identifying people who have been in contact with an infected person, thus providing a technological foundation to help slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The system aims to minimise privacy and security risks for individuals and communities and guarantee the highest level of data protection.

By publishing this document we seek feedback from a broad audience on the high-level design, its security and privacy properties, and the functionality it offers; so that further protection mechanisms can be added if weaknesses are identified. The white paper document is accompanied by an overview of the data protection aspects of the design, and a three page simplified introduction to the protocol.

If you have a similar project and you believe it would be beneficial to collaborate or exchange ideas drop an email here: dp3t@groupes.epfl.ch.

The following people are behind this design:

EPFL: Prof. Carmela Troncoso, Prof. Mathias Payer, Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Prof. Marcel Salathé, Prof. James Larus, Prof. Edouard Bugnion, Dr. Wouter Lueks, Theresa Stadler, Dr. Apostolos Pyrgelis, Dr. Daniele Antonioli, Ludovic Barman, Sylvain Chatel
ETHZ: Prof. Kenneth Paterson, Prof. Srdjan Capkun, Prof. David Basin, Prof. Jan Beutel, Dennis Jackson KU Leuven: Prof. Bart Preneel, Prof. Nigel Smart, Dr. Dave Singelee, Dr. Aysajan Abidin
TU Delft: Prof. Seda Gürses
University College London: Dr. Michael Veale
CISPA: Prof. Cas Cremers
University of Oxford: Dr. Reuben Binns
TU Berlin / Fraunhofer HHI: Prof. Thomas Wiegand
University of Torino / ISI Foundation: Prof. Ciro Cattuto

Contact email: dp3t@groupes.epfl.ch.

A note on the relationship between PEPP-PT and DP-3T

The Decentralised Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T) project is an open protocol for COVID-19 proximity tracing using Bluetooth Low Energy functionality on mobile devices that ensures personal data and computation stays entirely on an individual’s phone. It has been produced by a core team of over 25 scientists and academic researchers from across Europe. It has also been scrutinized and improved by the wider community.

DP-3T is a free-standing effort started at EPFL and ETHZ that produced this protocol and that is implementing it in a soon-to-be-released, open-sourced app and server. DP-3T sits under the loose umbrella of the ‘Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing’ (PEPP-PT) project. DP-3T is not the only protocol under this umbrella, which also endorses centralized approaches with very different privacy properties. Pandemics do not respect borders, so there is substantial value in PEPP-PT’s role of encouraging dialogue, knowledge-sharing and facilitating interoperability to enable trans-national roaming.

As the systems endorsed by PEPP-PT have technical differences that yield very different policy-relevant properties, it is a mistake to use the term ‘PEPP-PT’ to describe a specific solution or to refer PEPP-PT as if it embodies a single approach rather than several very different ones.