Homomorphic Encryption for Privacy-Preserving Route Overlap Detection
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current methods for detecting route overlap, such as those used during infectious disease outbreaks, often invade patient privacy and cause unintended damage to businesses, as they require detailed public disclosure of infected individuals' movement routes, leading to ambiguity in infection risk and potential increased spread of disease.
Innovation Solution
A mobile device equipped with a communicator, GPS unit, memory, and processor performs homomorphic encryption on GPS location information to generate and transmit encrypted movement path data to a server, allowing for overlap detection without revealing individual routes, using techniques like vector encoding and polynomial calculations to maintain privacy.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If detailed movement route information of infected patients is publicly disclosed to detect route overlap, then infection risk detection accuracy is improved, but patient privacy is invaded and unintended damage to stores is caused
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces encrypted movement route data as an intermediary between the patient's actual route and the public information system. The encryption acts as a mediator that allows route overlap detection while preventing direct access to sensitive personal information, thus resolving the contradiction between detection accuracy and privacy protection
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transforms the movement route data from plaintext to encrypted form, changing its state parameter. This parameter change allows the data to maintain its structural properties for overlap detection while losing its interpretability for privacy-sensitive information, thereby enabling accurate detection without privacy invasion
2Object-affected harmful factors
If movement route information is disclosed ambiguously to protect privacy, then patient privacy is protected, but infection risk recognition becomes difficult and disease spread may increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the movement route data into encrypted positional information that retains spatial relationships necessary for overlap detection. This segmentation allows the data to be partially revealed (enough for detection) while keeping the most sensitive aspects protected, balancing privacy protection with information availability
3Ease of operation
If detailed movement routes are disclosed to enable route overlap detection, then route overlap detection capability is improved, but stores along the route suffer unintended damage due to customer avoidance
Solution Approach 1:
The encrypted movement data serves as an intermediary that enables detection functionality while preventing the harmful side effect of store damage. By using encryption as a mediator, the system can detect overlaps without revealing specific location details that would cause customers to avoid stores, thus eliminating the unintended harm
Data Source
AI summary
A mobile device is disclosed. The device includes a communicator, a GPS unit for calculating location information, a memory, a display, and a processor, and the processor is configured to generate movement path information of the mobile device by performing homomorphic encryption of a plurality of pieces of location information stored in the memory, transmit the movement path information to a server apparatus through the communicator, based on operation result data obtained by operating based on the movement path information and comparison target path information being transmitted from the server apparatus, decrypt the operation result data, and output a message notifying whether a route overlaps the comparison target path information based on a decrypted result through the display. Therefore, the route overlap is rapidly and accurately confirmed without invasion of privacy.