Privately Connecting Mobility to Infectious Diseases via Applied Cryptography

Alexandros Bampoulidis; Alessandro Bruni; Lukas Helminger; Daniel Kales; Christian Rechberger; Roman Walch

Paper 2020/522

Privately Connecting Mobility to Infectious Diseases via Applied Cryptography

Alexandros Bampoulidis

Alessandro Bruni

Lukas Helminger

Daniel Kales

Christian Rechberger

Roman Walch

Abstract

Recent work has shown that cell phone mobility data has the unique potential to create accurate models for human mobility and consequently the spread of infected diseases. While prior studies have exclusively relied on a mobile network operator's subscribers' aggregated data in modelling disease dynamics, it may be preferable to contemplate aggregated mobility data of infected individuals only. Clearly, naively linking mobile phone data with health records would violate privacy by either allowing to track mobility patterns of infected individuals, leak information on who is infected, or both. This work aims to develop a solution that reports the aggregated mobile phone location data of infected individuals while still maintaining compliance with privacy expectations. To achieve privacy, we use homomorphic encryption, validation techniques derived from zero-knowledge proofs, and differential privacy. Our protocol's open-source implementation can process eight million subscribers in 70 minutes.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2022
Keywords: homomorphic encryption COVID-19 mobile data secure computation differential privacy infectious diseases
Contact author(s): lukas helminger @ iaik tugraz at
daniel kales @ iaik tugraz at
christian rechberger @ tugraz at
roman walch @ iaik tugraz at
History: 2022-06-13: last of 3 revisions; 2020-05-05: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2020/522
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/522,
      author = {Alexandros Bampoulidis and Alessandro Bruni and Lukas Helminger and Daniel Kales and Christian Rechberger and Roman Walch},
      title = {Privately Connecting Mobility to Infectious Diseases via Applied Cryptography},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2020/522},
      year = {2020},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/522}
}