Seminar by Prof Yi Xun, RMIT University, Australia, 28 Nov 2024, RTP Harvard Room

Time: 28 Nov 2024, 2pm to 3pm

Venue: Research Techno Plaza (RTP), Level 2, Harvard Room

Title: Contact Tracing with Location Privacy Protection

Bio: Dr. Xun Yi is a full professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He obtained his PhD from Xidian University, China in 1995. His research interests include data privacy and security, network security, and applied cryptography. He has published more than 250 journal and conference papers, attracting more than 8,000 citations. He has successfully led 11 Australian Research Council (ARC) projects, a Data61-RMIT CRP project, and participated in a collaborative project with Nanyang Technological University (NTU) funded by the Singapore government. From 2017 to 2019, Professor CI Yi served on various selection panels for the ARC, including the Discovery Project Selection Panel, Linkage Project Selection Panel, and DECRA Project Selection Panel. CI Yi has supervised more than 20 PhD students and 8 postdoctoral research fellows.

Abstract: The impact of COVID-19 has shown the need of contact tracing to quickly discover new infections and flatten the infection curve. Contact tracing deals with the challenge of identifying people who have had close contacts with individuals confirmed to be infected, which also helps identifying unreported infected people. When designing contact tracing systems, privacy protection of the citizens and power consumption of mobile devices are key considerations in order to minimise hurdles and enhance people's trust in adopting the systems. In this talk, we present three contact tracing protocols (basic, improved, advanced) based on homomorphic encryption, where multiple servers collaborate to perform contact tracing. The basic and improved protocols can protect location privacy for contactless mobile users, while the advanced protocol can protect both location and quarantine privacy for any mobile users, as long as one of multiple servers is honest.