COVID-SARS-2 is a nasty condition caused by COVID-19 that has seen many a person’s life cut short. The COVID-19 virus which originated from Wuhan, China has one particularly insidious trait: it can be spread by asymptomatic people. That is, you do not have to be suffering symptoms to be an infectious carrier of the condition.
As frustrating as isolation has been, it’s really our only viable solution to preventing this infectious condition from spreading like wildfire until we get a vaccine that will finally knock it on the head.
One solution that has been proposed has been to use contract tracing applications which rely on Bluetooth messaging to detect when an infected person comes into contact with others. Singapore developed the TraceTogether application. The Australian Government look like they might be adopting this application, our deputy CMO even suggesting it’d be made compulsory (before the PM poured water on that plan).
Now, the Android version of this, requires Android 5.1. My phone runs 4.1: I cannot run this application. Not everybody is in the habit of using Bluetooth, or even carries a phone. This got me thinking: can this be implemented in a stand-alone device?
The guts of this application is a protocol called BlueTrace which is described in this whitepaper. Reference implementations exist for Android and iOS.
I’ll have to look at the nitty-gritty of it, but essentially it looks like a stand-alone implementation on a ESP32 module maybe a doable proposition. The protocol basically works like this:
- Clients register using some contact details (e.g. a telephone number) to a server, which then issues back a “user ID” (randomised).
- The server then uses this to generate “temporary IDs” which are constructed by concatenating the “User ID” and token life-time start/finish timestamps together, encrypting that with the secret key, then appending the IV and an authentication token. This BLOB is then Base64-encoded.
- The client pulls down batches of these temporary IDs (forward-dated) to use for when it has no Internet connection available.
- Clients, then exchange these temporary IDs using BLE messaging.
This, looks doable in an ESP32 module. The ESP32 could be loaded up with tokens by a workstation. You then go about your daily business, carrying this device with you. When you get home, you plug the device into your workstation, and it uploads the “temporary IDs” it saw.
I’ll have to dig out my ESP32 module, but this looks like a doable proposition.
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