COVID-19 Access Control

Problem

COVID19 has stopped what seemed to be unstoppable - the world is standing still. The business impact for the travel industry is enormous: airplanes grounded, no international railways traffic, towed cruise ships not to mention... This situation creates new challenges for governments, businesses and people, stakeholders of a complex and international ecosystem. To open up travel again - what standardized, digital processes and tools can we rely on? How do we identify healthy people, provide them with easy to verify certificates, keeping user-privacy and GDPR in mind?

Solution

We propose a service of issuing Digital Certificates, like Healthcare credentials on European eID, that is running on European Blockchain Service Infrastructure. Solution is built on Verifiable Credentials standard and supports the most widely used networks for decentralized Identities: Ethereum and Hyperledger Indy. At the same time the project provides a possibility to login with OpenID Connect and SAML 2.0 standards to websites that helps support compatibility between new standards and existing systems. NFC and QRCode functionality can be used for physical access control and peer-to-peer data sharing.

What we have done during the weekend

We investigated and developed an integration with European Blockchain Service Infrastructure. Created test identities and implemented a possibility to import EBSI identities into our application. Prepared a demo of certificate issuance about the person being tested negative or vaccinated, scanning it and verification with another app. We validated our idea with blockchain and digital identity mentors, shared knowledge with other teams doing similar projects on the hackathon.

The solution’s impact to the crisis

The solution can be used to restart the travel industry, public transportation and large events without the risk of spreading the coronavirus. Also the solution enables online services to function where in-person presence was required to check documents.

The necessities in order to continue the project.

We’re going to communicate with EBSI and continue closer integration with their infrastructure. As a part of COVID-19 Credentials initiative we will contribute to development of use cases. Also, we need to talk to healthcare authorities to support international COVID-19 initiatives and continue development of the product.

The value of our solution after the crisis

The solution can be extended with other types of digital credentials, e.g. Education, Financial, Retail and Legal. Our main goal is reducing the usage of paper certificates and using digital instead. The growing of EBSI network and it’s adoption will create many other use cases that can be implemented at our solution.

Global cooperation

Working together with TietoEVRY and Findy consortium to implement such a solution in Finland. Also Infopulse is part of COVID-19 Credentials Initiative: https://www.covidcreds.com/