Paper 2020/484

Applicability of Mobile Contact Tracing in Fighting Pandemic (COVID-19): Issues, Challenges and Solutions

Aaqib Bashir Dar and Auqib Hamid Lone and Saniya Zahoor and Afshan Amin Khan and Roohie Naaz

Abstract

Contact Tracing is considered as the first and the most effective step towards containing an outbreak, as resources for mass testing and large quantity of vaccines are highly unlikely available for immediate utilisation. Effective contact tracing can allow societies to reopen from lock-down even before availability of vaccines. The objective of mobile contact tracing is to speed up the manual interview based contact tracing process for containing an outbreak efficiently and quickly. In this paper we throw light on some of the issues and challenges pertaining to the adaption of mobile contact tracing for fighting COVID-19. In essence we proposed an Evaluation framework for mobile contact tracing solutions to determine their feasibility and effectiveness. We evaluate some of the available contact tracing solutions in light of our proposed framework. Furthermore we presented possible attacks that could be launched against contact tracing solutions with necessary countermeasures to thwart any possibility of such attacks.