Fight the pandemic during DO-Hackathon

I had this little idea for some months already: Building a secure contact tracking / diary app to help prevent the COVID-19 spreading.

After reading the Digital Ocean Hackathon announcement earlier this this month, I decided to sat down and execute on this project.

The idea is, you log with whom you had close contact. In case you get infected (and I hope you wont), you can warn your contacts, without forgetting one. Then they in turn can isolate and stop spreading the disease further. 🎉

Since security and data protection is very important, especially for health related apps, I decided to save the logged contacts on the users' devices. And I'm planning to go one step further:
Reading

A Practical Guide to the Web Cryptography API

David R. Myers ・ Sep 9 ・ 5 min read

#javascript #webdev #tutorial #cryptography

and tinkering around with Web Crypto I was eager to use that somewhere. 🔐

That means, the logged contacts will be stored encrypted locally on users device, not sent in the cloud, or analyzed anywhere else. It also means, I won't need much of Digital Oceans app platform resources, only static hosting and DNS. Luckily, that's also part of their platform, so we're golden.

Oh, and for the interested ones: There's already a working Proof of Concept available at covtact.app. Don't get scared by the WIP UI, set a Encryption password and log ahead! It's all working as of now.
🚀🔥👍

And for the even more interested ones:

kriswep / covtacts

Stop the COVID-19 spread by tracking your contacts.

For feedback, comment down here and/or connect with me on twitter.