Towards Defeating Mass Surveillance and SARS-CoV-2: The Pronto-C2 Fully Decentralized Automatic Contact Tracing System

Automatic contact tracing is currently used in several countries in order to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Many governments decided to develop smartphone apps based on the “Exposure Notifications” designed by Apple and Google according to a decentralized approach previously proposed by the DP-3T team. Decentralization was pushed as a key feature to protect privacy in contrast to centralized approaches that could leverage automatic contact tracing to realize mass-surveillance programs. In this work, taking into account the privacy and integrity vulnerabilities of DP-3T systems, we show the design of a decentralized contact tracing system named Pronto-C2 that has better resilience against various attacks. We also discuss the significant overhead of Pronto-C2 when used in real-world scenarios.