A First Look at Privacy Analysis of COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Mobile Applications.
A First Look at Privacy Analysis of COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Mobile Applications.
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DOI：
10.1109/jiot.2020.3024180
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发表时间：
2021-11-01
影响因子：
10.6
通讯作者：
Ahmad F
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Azad MA;Arshad J;Akmal SMA;Riaz F;Abdullah S;Imran M;Ahmad F
如今的智能手机配备了大量强大的增值传感器和功能，比如低功耗蓝牙传感器，强大的嵌入式传感器，如数字罗盘、加速度计、全球定位系统传感器、无线网络功能、麦克风、湿度传感器、健康追踪传感器以及摄像头等等。这些增值传感器在很多方面彻底改变了人类的生活，比如追踪病人的健康状况和医生的行动，追踪大型制造企业中员工的行动，监测环境等等。这些嵌入式传感器还可用于大规模的个人、群体和社区感知应用，特别是追踪某些疾病的传播。政府和监管机构正转而利用这些功能来追踪可能出现某些疾病或病毒（例如新冠病毒）症状的人员的相关情况。2019年12月新冠疫情爆发以来，用于追踪、跟踪和隔离出现新冠症状人员以限制疾病在更大社区传播的移动应用大量涌现。嵌入式传感器的使用可能会泄露用户的私人信息，从而可能对用户的隐私和安全构成威胁。在本文中，我们分析了大量旨在遏制新冠病毒传播并使人们恢复正常生活的智能手机应用。具体而言，我们分析了这些智能手机应用需要何种权限，这些权限对于追踪来说是否必要，用户设备的数据是如何传输到分析中心的，以及分析了这些应用为确保用户隐私和安全所采取的安全措施。
Today’s smartphones are equipped with a large number of powerful value-added sensors and features, such as a low-power Bluetooth sensor, powerful embedded sensors, such as the digital compass, accelerometer, GPS sensors, Wi-Fi capabilities, microphone, humidity sensors, health tracking sensors, and a camera, etc. These value-added sensors have revolutionized the lives of the human being in many ways, such as tracking the health of the patients and the movement of doctors, tracking employees movement in large manufacturing units, monitoring the environment, etc. These embedded sensors could also be used for large-scale personal, group, and community sensing applications especially tracing the spread of certain diseases. Governments and regulators are turning to use these features to trace the people’s thoughts to have symptoms of certain diseases or viruses, e.g., COVID-19. The outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019, has seen a surge of the mobile applications for tracing, tracking, and isolating the persons showing COVID-19 symptoms to limit the spread of the disease to the larger community. The use of embedded sensors could disclose private information of the users, thus potentially bring a threat to the privacy and security of users. In this article, we analyzed a large set of smartphone applications that have been designed to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus and bring the people back to normal life. Specifically, we have analyzed what type of permission these smartphone apps require, whether these permissions are necessary for the track and trace, how data from the user devices are transported to the analytic center, and analyzing the security measures these apps have deployed to ensure the privacy and security of users.