Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has recently announced the launch of a new mobile app that will help to notify Canadians of COVID-19 exposure. ERTICO Partner BlackBerry has undertaken a security review of the app developed by the Government of Ontario to help Canadians identify and isolate COVID-19.
BlackBerry has been looking at a number of technologies and ways to use them to support the fight against COVID-19. Their work with the Canadian government on their contact exposure notification application consists of reviewing the security and privacy of the solution. Exposure notification applications work better as more of the population downloads and uses them. As the Canadian Digital Service and Ontario Digital Service look to roll out and deploy this solution, BlackBerry is providing pro-bono architectural audits, security audits, and code reviews to ensure that potential attack vectors (like denial of service attacks or flooding of false information) are addressed in the solution’s design. The solution has also been designed for privacy and it does not track personal information, health data, or geo-location data. BlackBerry hopes that with both privacy and security designed into the solution from the start it will help encourage widespread public adoption that will enable a decrease in COVID-19 cases throughout the country.
Read the full press release by the Canadian Government here.
Source: Canadian Government/BlackBerry
