A Canadian company developing innovative privacy and security-focused software solutions

Technical Details

EpiTrace© Sentinel is deployed as a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, and is not constrained by arbitrary geographical boundaries, making it ideal for rapid deployment on a national—or even international—scale. It can also be installed and configured on laptops/portable devices that meet the requirements below for deployment to locations that do not have reliable connection to the web. EpiTrace Sentinel truly is a global solution for pandemic and epidemic events.

This enables the deployment of EpiTrace into regions or areas that may have limited infrastructure resources, and/or into the field for only the duration required to address an outbreak. Rapid deployment and portability are vital advantages when dealing with epidemic/pandemic scenarios..

Most 64-bit computers can run EpiTrace software.

The current implementation is supported only on computers validated and provisioned by RSSS Inc. and conforming to the following requirements:

  • Standard architecture PC motherboard
  • AMD64 CPU (AMD or Intel)
  • 16GB DRAM
  • BIOS-selectable boot (USB 3.1/HDD/SDD)
  • 2 x 4TB disks (*2: RAID1++)
  • 2 x Gigabit Ethernet interfaces

Upon this hardware EpiTrace implements a software stack comprised as follows:

  • OpenBSD (v6.7)
  • MariaDB-server (v10.3.18)
  • Apache 2 HTTP server (v2.4.41)
  • GNU C (v4.2.1)
  • GNU Make (v4.2.1)
  • GNU Prolog (v1.4.5)
  • EpiTrace Sentinel CGIs (v3.µ.1.ç)
  • EpiTrace Sentinel HTML (v5)

All licensing conformant to http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html

Support for Prolog and C sources and build files for EpiTrace Sentinel CGIs provided separately by RSSS Inc. Access to implementation source code subject to end-use license constraints.

The primary user interface for EpiTrace Sentinel is a web browser (Chrome/Edge/Firefox/Safari) and requires no installation of additional software or extensions/add-ons to the browser. Maintaining a simple front end allows EpiTrace to be accessed from any system with an internet connection and a current web browser release. This significantly reduces administration and technical support demands.

Security privileges are role-based and allow system administrators to define and manage who has access to the system, and how much of the data users in defined roles can see.

Privacy is maintained by assigning uniquely-generated anonymous ID tokens to each contact in the system, and by collecting the minimum viable information required for the system to be functional. Only authorized users with the highest access privileges have the ability to access personal identifying information. Lower privilege users are only able to see and monitor the anonymous tokens.

Data interchange is supported, with the capability to import and export data in common, industry standard formats. This allows the data in EpiTrace Sentinel to be exported for use in epidemiological research, public health events tracing efforts, and more.