The Government releases the source code of its Radar COVID tracking app and publishes it on GitHub – Explica

On September 1, SEDIA (Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence) announced the code release imminent of their controversial mobile Radar COVID tracking app, with which they intend to trace the contacts of coronavirus patients and thus be able to detect other infected people in good time.

They then dated said release for today September 9, and they justified it based on transparency and their intention that the community could help improve the app although many are now wondering why wait for such an advanced stage of its implementation if the developer community really wanted to help out.

The delay in the publication of said code, since it had already been said at the beginning of August that the intention was for the final version to be open source, is due to the fact that the government wanted to wait for all the CCAA that requested it to have it integrated into their systems.

But the aspect of transparency is a fundamental aspect of this code release, as many voices had been raised criticizing the possible malicious uses that the government could give such sensitive information as was the complete list of users of the app that each of us would have met in the last week.

Now, having the code enables programming experts to take a look under the hood of the applicationIn order to confirm whether the actual management of personal data observable in the app code coincides with that previously explained by SEDIA, as well as to rule out the existence of hidden functionalities.

The code has been available for a few minutes on GitHub, divided into five repositories that correspond to each of the software that makes up the tracking system:

The applications for users: both versions of the app (iOS and Android) are developed entirely in Kotklin.

The DP-3T server: This software, developed in Java, is a fork of the original DP-3T.

The verification service server: This software developed in Java allows the CCAA to request verification codes to provide them to COVID-19 patients.

The configuration service server: This software, developed in Java, allows user applications to obtain information about the Autonomous Communities and the available languages.

As a negative point, it is striking that application documentation (with instructions that allow, for example, to compile them on our computers) is entirely in English.

Radar Covid bases its operation on an API developed jointly by Google and Apple, based in turn on a European protocol developed by at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology by a team led by the Spanish engineer Carmela Troncoso.

Said protocol, called DP-3T by the acronym of his full name in English, it would come to be translated as privacy-preserving decentralized proximity tracking (Its operation, as well as that of the API, has been explained in detail by our colleagues at Xataka).

DP-3T is subject to an open source license, the Mozilla Public License 2.0, which allows reuse the code in applications attached to other licenses, both proprietary and those with a clear commitment to free software (such as the GNU license used, for example, by Linux).

And that license, MPL 2.0, It will also be the one chosen by SEDIA to release the COVID Radar code, despite the fact that there is already another license (the EUPL or European Union Public License) created precisely for the purpose of make it easier for EU public administrations to release the code of its technological developments.

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The Government releases the source code of its Radar COVID tracking app and publishes it on GitHub - Explica