IoTrace: A Flexible, Efficient, and Privacy-Preserving IoT-Enabled Architecture for Contact Tracing

Contact tracing promises to help fight the spread of COVID-19 via an early detection of possible contagion events. To this end, most existing solutions share the following architecture: smartphones continuously broadcast random beacons that are intercepted by nearby devices and stored into their local contact logs. In this article, we propose an IoT-enabled architecture for contact tracing that relaxes the smartphone-centric assumption, and provides a solution that enjoys the following features: it reduces the overhead on the end user to the bare minimum - the mobile device only broadcasts its beacons; it provides the user with a degree of privacy not achieved by competing solutions - even in the most privacy adverse scenario, the solution provides k-anonymity; and it is flexible: the same architecture can be configured to support several models - ranging from fully decentralized to fully centralized ones - and the system parameters can be tuned to support the tracing of several social interaction models. What is more, our proposal can also be adopted to tackle future human-proximity transmissible diseases. Finally, we also highlight open issues and discuss a number of future research directions at the intersection of IoT and contact tracing.