Hybrid Cryptography with a One–Time Stamp to Secure Contact Tracing for COVID–19 Infection

Abstract

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic changed the lives of millions of citizens worldwide in the manner they live and work to the so-called new norm in social standards. In addition to the extraordinary effects on society, the pandemic created a range of unique circumstances associated with cybercrime that also affected society and business. The anxiety due to the pandemic increased the probability of successful cyberattacks and as well as their number and range. For public health officials and communities, location tracking is an essential component in the efforts to combat the disease. The governments provide a lot of mobile apps to help health officials to trace the infected persons and contact them to aid and follow up on the health status, which requires an exchange of data in different forms. This paper presents the one-time stamp model as a new cryptography technique to secure different contact forms and protect the privacy of the infected person. The one-time stamp hybrid model consists of a combination of symmetric, asymmetric, and hashing cryptography in an entirely new way that is different from conventional and similar existing algorithms. Several experiments have been carried out to analyze and examine the proposed technique. Also, a comparison study has been made between our proposed technique and other state-of-the-art alternatives. Results show that the proposed one-time stamp model provides a high level of security for the encryption of sensitive data relative to other similar techniques with no extra computational cost besides faster processing time.