A Privacy-Preserving and Overhead-Free Protocol for Direct Donations to People Impacted by COVID-19 Lockdowns

Abstract

COVID-19 caused large-scale, long-lasting lockdowns in many parts of the world, which resulted in many people in need for financial or other aids. Governments, charities, and communities rushed to provide help. To complement these efforts and to provide direct assistance to individuals who may not get sufficient and/or timely assistance otherwise, we designed a privacy-preserving and overhead-free protocol named "Fireside Help" for matching donors and people-in-need. This protocol aims to provide maximum privacy protection. Only the assigned volunteer verifiers can know about details of the applications from people-in-need and the donations from the donors that they verified. No one else, including the Fireside Help system itself, can gain any knowledge beyond digital checksums and information intentionally made public. This protocol uses proven, free, and widely available hash functions such as SHA-256, SHA-1, or MD-5 to ensure the integrity of the system without revealing private information. The protocol was designed initially to help students in Wuhan, China, the very first city to lock down. Later, it was revised to help anyone around the world who has been impacted by COVID-19. Several real-world transactions were completed in the system that demonstrated its utility and robustness.