Contact Tracing - A Safe Affair?

The ongoing global pandemic has caused rising demand for automated contact tracing solutions. While it is a desirable goal to automatically notify persons who may have been in contact with an infected person, this comes with many problems for Security and Privacy. We will talk about these problems and potential solutions at our workshop, different designs of contact tracing protocols, and experiences from the development and deployment of contact tracing applications.

We will have presentations by the following five international experts, followed by a panel discussion:

Edouard Bugnion is the Vice President for Information Systems at EPFL, Switzerland. He is an advisor to the Swiss national COVID-19 science task force and is part of the team behind the design of the DP3T protocol which is at the basis of contact tracing applications used in multiple European countries, such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Vincent Roca is the leader of the PRIVATICS team at Inria, France. He and his team are designers of the contact tracing protocols DESIRE and ROBERT, upon which the French contact tracing application is built.

Véronique Cortier is the research director of the French National Scientific Research Center (CNRS) at the LORIA laboratory in Nancy, France. She has co-authored a document on the risk of contact tracing apps and has spoken about risks and limitations of contact tracing applications at a hearing at the European parliament.

Krzysztof Pietrzak is the head of the Cryptography Group at IST Austria. He has proposed cryptographic solutions for common weaknesses of contact tracing protocols, such as the vulnerability against replay and relay attacks.

Walter Hötzendorfer is a senior researcher and senior consultant at the Research Institute - Digital Human Rights Center in Vienna, Austria. As a permanent advisor of the Austrian Red Cross in data protection he participated in the design of the Austrian Stopp Corona App.

Christian Kudera is a researcher at SBA Research in Vienna and is an experienced security analyst. He is part of a team of technical and legal experts that performed a security analysis of the Austrian Stopp-Corona application.

Join the online workshop here.

About

ViSP, the Vienna Cybersecurity and Privacy Research Center, consists of researchers from IST Austria, TU Wien and Uni Wien. With these three institutes, Vienna offers an exceptional degree of excellence for research in the area of Security and Privacy. The mission of ViSP is to unlock the true potential of the location by fostering collaborations between different institutes in Vienna. Through this collaboration we strive to do impactful research and advance the state of the art, securing a pioneer role of Vienna in the research in Security and Privacy.

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