vContact: Private WiFi-based Contact Tracing with Virus Lifespan

Covid-19 is primarily spread through contact with the virus which may survive on surfaces with lifespan of more than hours. To curb its spread, it is hence of vital importance to detect and quarantine those who have been in contact with the virus for sustained period of time, the so-called close contacts. In this work, we study, for the first time, automatic contact detection when the virus has a lifespan. Leveraging upon the ubiquity of WiFi signals, we propose a novel, private, and fully distributed WiFi-based approach called vContact. Users installing an app continuously scan WiFi and store its hashed IDs. Given a confirmed case, the signals of the major places he/she visited are then uploaded to a server and matched with the stored signals of users to detect contact. vContact is not based on phone pairing, and no information of any other users is stored locally. The confirmed case does not need to have installed the app for it to work properly. As WiFi data are sampled sporadically, we propose efficient signal processing approaches and similarity metric to align and match signals of any time. We conduct extensive indoor and outdoor experiments to evaluate the performance of vContact. Our results demonstrate that vContact is efficient and robust for contact detection. The precision and recall of contact detection are high (in the range of 50-90%) for close contact proximity (2m). Its performance is robust with respect to signal lengths (AP numbers) and phone heterogeneity. By implementing vContact as an app, we present a case study to demonstrate the validity of our design in notifying its users their exposure to virus with lifespan.