Skip to content

This repository contains snippets of code that show how the Exposure Notifications API works inside the Google Play services layer.

License

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

ljl-covid/exposure-notifications-internals

 
 

Repository files navigation

Exposure Notifications API

This repository contains a snapshot of code from Google Play Services' Exposure Notifications module. It was published as part of a transparency effort, and there are no current plans to update the code contained within the repo.

Key Features

There are a number of features in this source set, including abstrations and JNI. The following sections provide key features with pointers to the source code.

BLE MAC and RPI Rotation

Code: com.google.samples.exposurenotification.ble.advertising.BleAdvertiser#startAdvertising

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) MAC addresses rotate on average every 15 minutes to prevent remote location tracking that could be accomplished by tying together observations of a fixed MAC address.

In order to best protect user privacy, the Exposure Notifications framework ensures that Rolling Proximity Identifiers (RPIs) are never rotated without also having a corresponding change of the Bluetooth MAC address. For more details, see the full Bluetooth spec.

Because Android doesn't have a callback to notify an application that the Bluetooth MAC address is changing (or has changed), this is handled by explicitly stopping and restarting advertising whenever a new RPI is generated.

Since there isn't any callback, it is possible for the Bluetooth MAC address to rotate before a new RPI is generated. In this case the following would happen:

Time Bluetooth MAC RPI
:00 00:00:00:01 AAA
:09 00:00:00:02 AAA
:10 00:00:00:03 BBB

The risk posed by this is minimal, since even though an observer may be able to tie the MAC addresses 00:00:00:01 and 00:00:00:02 together using the common RPI, the duration of both MAC addresses is no longer than a single RPI period (~10 minutes). When the RPI rotates, the MAC address rotates again, making it difficult to track the association of either the MAC address or RPI to a common device.

Rolling Proximity Identifier Generation

Code: com.google.samples.exposurenotification.ble.advertising.RollingProximityIdManager#getCurrentRollingProximityId Code: com.google.samples.exposurenotification.data.generator.TemporaryExposureKeyGenerator

Rolling Proximity Identifiers (RPIs) are generated from a Temporary Exposure Key (TEK) based on the Exposure Notification Cryptography Specification.

For more information about TEKs and RPIs, see Exposure Notifications Cryptography

Associated Encrypted Metadata

Code: com.google.samples.exposurenotification.ble.advertising.BleAdvertisementGenerator Code: com.google.samples.exposurenotification.data.generator.AssociatedEncryptedMetadataHelper

Associated Encrypted Metadata is generated by BleAdvertisementGenerator#generatePacket based on the Exposure Notification Cryptography Specification. This uses BluetoothMetadata#create to create the metadata itself.

The encryption, decryption, and generation of keys is handled by the class AssociatedEncryptedMetadataHelper.

For more information about Associated Encrypted Metadata, see Exposure Notifications Cryptography

Key Matching

Code: com.google.samples.exposurenotification.matching.MatchingJni

The core process of Key Matching is started via MatchingJni. The class then calls into native C++ code to improve performance by avoiding Java binder calls for the many crypto operations needed.

A MatchingJni object is initialized with a list of scanned RPIs from the past 14 days. The caller can pass a list of Diagnosis Key files, provided by the Healthcare Authority app, to the method MatchingJni#matching. This method produces a list of TemporaryExposureKeys corresponding to the Diagnosis Keys that the device was exposed to.

About

This repository contains snippets of code that show how the Exposure Notifications API works inside the Google Play services layer.

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published

Languages

  • Java 92.6%
  • C++ 4.9%
  • Kotlin 1.6%
  • CMake 0.9%