NovidChain: Blockchain‐based privacy‐preserving platform for COVID‐19 test/vaccine certificates

Abstract

The COVID‐19 pandemic has emerged as a highly transmissible disease which has caused a disastrous impact worldwide by adversely affecting the global economy, health, and human lives. This sudden explosion and uncontrolled worldwide spread of COVID‐19 has revealed the limitations of existing healthcare systems regarding handling public health emergencies. As governments seek to effectively re‐establish their economies, open workplaces, ensure safe travels and progressively return to normal life, there is an urgent need for technologies that may alleviate the severity of the losses. This article explores a promising solution for secure Digital Health Certificate, called NovidChain, a Blockchain‐based privacy‐preserving platform for COVID‐19 test/vaccine certificates issuing and verifying. More precisely, NovidChain incorporates several emergent concepts: (i) Blockchain technology to ensure data integrity and immutability, (ii) self‐sovereign identity to allow users to have complete control over their data, (iii) encryption of Personally Identifiable Information to enhance privacy, (iv) W3C verifiable credentials standard to facilitate instant verification of COVID‐19 proof, and (v) selective disclosure concept to permit user to share selected pieces of information with trusted parties. Therefore, NovidChain is designed to meet a high level of protection of personal data, in compliant with the GDPR and KYC requirements, and guarantees the user's self‐sovereignty, while ensuring both the safety of populations and the user's right to privacy. To prove the security and efficiency of the proposed NovidChain platform, this article also provides a detailed technical description, a proof‐of‐concept implementation, different experiments, and a comparative evaluation. The evaluation shows that NovidChain provides better financial cost and scalability results compared to other solutions. More precisely, we note a high difference in time between operations (i.e., between 46% and 56%). Furthermore, the evaluation confirms that NovidChain ensures security properties, particularly data integrity, forge, binding, uniqueness, peer‐indistinguishability, and revocation.

A Survey on Digital Certificates Approaches for the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Typically, this is done through a medical certificate proving that the holder is immune or is not currently infected. Based on the related literature, three basic types of digital health certificates can be identified: (a) vaccination certificates, referring to whether a person has received the vaccine or not [11]- [15]; (b) diagnostic test certificates, demonstrating that a person has undergone a test [14], [16], [17]; and (c) immunity certificates or immunity passports, attesting that a person was infected in the past and has developed antibodies [12]- [14], [17]- [19]. The underlying technologies for preserving the security and privacy of digital health certificates are blockchain and traditional public key cryptography.…”

“…NovidChain [14] addresses all the different types of certificates by integrating the use of VCs in a blockchain im-plementation called uPort [23], which provides SSI aspects on top of the Ethereum platform. The certificate holder's personal data and test results are stored encrypted on IPFS, and only the IPFS hash is kept on a private permissioned Ethereum blockchain.…”

Advanced data integration in banking, financial, and insurance software in the age of COVID‐19

“…In the near future innovative information integration system software design could be the solution to achieve sustainability during pandemic like situations. [75][76][77][78][79] Figure 12 above visually represents the impact of COVID on the global BFSIs. Before the COVID-19 pandemic most of the global BFSIs offered traditional services to their consumers such as branch banking, ATMs, and others.…”

“…Ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic has already accelerated the usage of information integration significantly across the global BFSIs. In the near future innovative information integration system software design could be the solution to achieve sustainability during pandemic like situations 75–79 …”

LoRaChainCare: An IoT Architecture Integrating Blockchain and LoRa Network for Personal Health Care Data Monitoring

“…Traditional healthcare systems are not able to meet these crucial requirements because they cannot ensure the safe use and sharing of data in a secure and a controlled way. Hence, to face reliability, fault tolerance and privacy challenges, Blockchain technology is recently adopted in the medical and e-health domain [7][8][9][10][11][12]. This technology is a secure and transparent distributed ledger, and it paves the way for a revolution in existing healthcare systems by integrating its unique features [13][14][15].…”