Immunity Passport Ledger: Digital Certificates Implemented on a Permissioned Blockchain

ABSTRACT

The global outbreak of Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) which in 2020 reached pandemic scale, has been a central topic of debate in our society. Concerns over the ease of transmission of the infection led to the imposition of measures restricting freedom such as curfews, lockdown, general confinement, and closure of trade. Technology was one of the tools used to resist to the spread of the disease using applications that, on one hand, track contacts to warn users that were close to someone infected and, on the other hand, provide immunity digital certification. Despite the relevance of these options, end users have no confidence, transparency, and responsibility that the registration and use of their health data are ethical, secure, anonymous, and available through verifiable credentials and, most importantly, is being used for its main purpose. Consequently, a solution based on a distributed ledger technology, such as blockchain, is introduced to assure the trustworthiness and integrity of user’s data. Since the proposed application embraced user privacy, we conducted a comparative study between permissioned blockchains, that includes an authorization ion layer and ensures that certain actions can only be performed by identifiable participants. We concluded that Hyperledger Fabric was an option that fulfilled all the requirements to develop a platform for the immunity passport ledger. Its modularity and versatility accommodates the needs that were initially proposed for the development of a proof of concept. The work leads us to propose that further research be conducted regarding scalability and performance evaluation. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.