NJIT Security Expert Applies Startup's Tech to COVID-19 Tracing

The healthcare process of identifying who traveled close to contagious patients, known as contact tracing, typically assumes a lack of privacy — but NJIT cybersecurity expert Kurt Rohloff said his software is a good match to fix this.

Rohloff is known in the computer security field for his work in homomorphic encryption, which is a method of processing private information without decrypting it or exposing the sensitive parts. The method has roots in defense and intelligence applications, but is also useful for healthcare and the COVID-19 pandemic, he observed, in a recent United Nations Global Summit webinar series called AI For Good.
 
Working on data without decrypting it tends to sacrifice some speed, however, "Contact tracing provides a much more quick and [more] effective response than potentially locking down a country if done early enough," said Rohloff, director of NJIT's Cybersecurity Research Center. "It's intended to be a less-painful step ... but it is very, very privacy-intensive."
 
He cited a healthcare joke from The New Yorker where a doctor tells a patient, "Your previous provider refused to share your electronic medical records, but not to worry — I was able to obtain all of your information online."
 
Rohloff said his startup company, Duality Technologies, has prototype software for contact tracing running at a scale of several hundred thousand contacts. The input is encrypted data about where and when a mobile device reported its location, and the output is data about which other devices have matching results. It's challenging to keep up with ever-changing privacy regulations in different countries, he added.
 
"We started developing this capability for Israel, but the Israeli government changed their privacy regulations, which reduced the need for this capability," he explained.
 
The software's impact on minimizing the spread of a virus isn't just for the next pandemic — it can still be used for the current one, Rohloff said.
 
"We have been in touch with several government entities. We see this technology as being useful for protecting isolated communities which have not yet been impacted," he explained, noting that it's also useful to identify new cases when governments re-open their economies.
 
The presentation is available on the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union website.