Covid 19: Vaccine Passports can be solved using blockchain
Vaccine passports are old news (yellow fever anyone?) so what’s all the fuss about Covid 19 vaccination passports? The solution is very simple with blockchain. Here is an example of how it works
Vaccinations and travelling
There has been much discussion about the issues of allowing people to travel using vaccination proof of record passports and the reticence of many countries to implement them, such as— cost; privacy; and it seems inverted snobbery too. And yet proof of vaccination has been required by many countries since the 18th Century.
In India, for example, some vaccines are recommended or required. In 2019, 11 million foreign visitors would have followed the National Travel Health Network and Centre and WHO recommendations for the following vaccinations : hepatitis A, hepatitis B, typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, rabies, polio and tetanus.
It is quite likely Covid 19 will be added to the list.
A smartphone and a passport
With today’s technology, it is very simple to provide a proof of record for all vaccinations, not just Covid 19. Most people who travel abroad have smartphones and will usually have a machine readable passport. Instead of having a stamp inside the passport or other paper and electronic documents (easy to forge) — all you need is a web app (PWA, Electron, website app store etc) that can access a blockchain that verifies the persons current vaccination status. If the app is unavailable, Passport Security can enter information from the passport onto the internet and gain proof there is a vaccine certificate.
As for privacy, the blockchain does not hold any personal data at all. It acts only as proof a vaccination record exists, so no need for GDPR or regulatory concerns. The blockchain is permanent, cannot be hacked or deleted and is language agnostic. It is just an index / public key.
How
On arrival in a foreign country, a visitor would normally need to demonstrate they have been vaccinated. In this sense it is a match between a person and a certificate. The person can be identified via the passport and when verified, the certificate would show dates, types of vaccines, where they were done and so on.
For a country to accept the certification, it is likely the certificate would be produced by a government agency or approved organisation and stored on a system accessible via API (The UK’s DVLA is an example). The passport authority would be considered the primary node to the blockchain (in this case they would probably work in conjunction with other government agencies such as a Foreign Office, Health Organisation or Consulate who could also be nodes). A node in this case would be an authorisation or controlling body and would involve nothing more than hashing a base64 of the original certificate file (e.g a pdf or better a json text file) and putting this onto the blockchain and carrying verification checks.
Passport numbers are unique within a country. It is usually a number. This acts as the password to opening up the entry on the blockchain.
A passport holder would have in their app, a copy of the certificate held in local storage.
Process when at passport control:
- Visit app / website
- Enter the country code + passport number + date of birth
- This is hashed and checked against the blockchain
- If the hash is found, the app reports it as being on the blockchain (and is current and active)
- The app then api’s onto a government website with proof of record from the blockchain and comes back with a copy of the certificate.
- If there is no internet, the locally held copy could be used in its place with a proof of record check and hash.
What is stored on the blockchain?
One hash and a timestamp. And that is it. The hash is a one way fixed length string that is derived from an input. It is likely the blockchain will be recorded on a side database for faster searching.
Block = SHA256(Country Code, Passport Number, Date of Birth)
Who benefits?
As an open source initiative, the only actual monetary cost is the running of the blockchain and a website app. The blockchain could be Ethereum since it has been up and running for a number of years and the only cost would be the first insert onto its blockchain. After that, the chain entry would be accessible via an explorer or simple api. We are talking about a few cents at the most. In fact, any open source blockchain could be used such as Hyperledger.
Can I see this in action?
Yes, please contact info@grandeo.co. Grandeo is a UK based blockchain specialist and has developed many blockchain solutions include voting systems and data room document storage.
