Franco-German researchers responsible for developing the future application to track people contaminated by covid-19 published their technical proposal on Saturday for a system, managed by a centralized health authority, which will be the subject of a parliamentary debate in France.
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No use of geolocation data
Developed by teams from the National Research Institute for Digital Science and Technology (Inria) in collaboration with researchers from the German Fraunhofer Institute, this protocol, called "Robert", is based on sharing, by people detected positive at covid-19, from a list of anonymous identifiers corresponding to the people they encountered during the incubation period of the virus and detected using Bluetooth wireless technology. This protocol does not use geolocation data from smartphones.
If it is finally selected, it will constitute the technical foundation of the StopCovid application, which should help to contain the epidemic of covid-19 after the release from containment on May 11.
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This publication represents "an important step" which makes it possible to "shed concrete light on the way in which the application will work", declared to AFP the secretary of state in charge of digital, Cédric O. "The Robert protocol will be the basis of what will be submitted to the CNIL [the gendarme of personal data] and will be used for the parliamentary debate "scheduled for April 28, he added, also ensuring that" the CNIL will have to decide again on the final version of the application ".
Secure server
The protocol is designed so that "no one, not even the State, has access to the list of people diagnosed positive or to the list of social interactions between people," explained Inria CEO Bruno Sportisse. , in a press release.
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In this system, a user of the application diagnosed positive will be asked to "give his consent so that his history of crypto-identifiers encountered is sent to a server of a health authority without disclosing his own crypto-identifiers". All users of the application will periodically check with this server if their own identifiers are among those deemed to be "at risk".
Health authorities will thus keep their hands on the system and will be able in particular to adjust the criteria making it possible to assess the risk of contamination in order to reduce the number of false positives.
Pan-European initiative
This proposal is part of a pan-European initiative bringing together various technical proposals which must meet a set of principles (such as compliance with European regulations on personal data or complete anonymity of users), and allow interoperability between the various solutions implemented by the States.
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But researchers within the initiative are in favor of a more decentralized solution and doubt the sincerity of a system dependent on an authority. "It seems that [the INRIA protocol] is built on trust in the central authorities and on the assumption that they will behave honestly and be impervious to compromise," said Nadim Kobeissi, an expert, on his website on Saturday. in cryptography and cyber-security, which worries that the server generates both temporary identifiers and stores case-contacts.