A Privacy-Preserving Platform for Recording COVID-19 Vaccine Passports

Barati, Masoud; Buchanan, William J; Lo, Owen; Rana, Omer

Abstract

Digital vaccination passports are being proposed by various governments internationally. Trust, scalability and security are all key challenges in implementing an online vaccine passport. Initial approaches attempt to solve this problem by using centralised systems with trusted authorities. However, sharing vaccine passport data between different organisations, regions and countries has become a major challenge. A platform for creating, storing and verifying digital COVID-19 vaccine certifications is presented, making use of InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to guarantee that there is no single point of failure and to allow data to be securely distributed globally. Blockchain and smart contracts are also integrated into the platform to explicitly determine policies and log access rights to the passport data while ensuring all actions are audited and verifiably immutable. Our proposed platform realises General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements in terms of user consent, data encryption, data erasure and accountability obligations. We assess the scalability and performance of the platform using IPFS and Blockchain test networks.

Citation

Barati, M., Buchanan, W. J., Lo, O., & Rana, O. (2021, December). A Privacy-Preserving Platform for Recording COVID-19 Vaccine Passports. Presented at 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing, Leicester

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing
• Start Date: Dec 6, 2021
• End Date: Dec 9, 2021
• Acceptance Date: Oct 26, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Feb 7, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022
• Deposit Date: Dec 3, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 3, 2021
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Book Title: UCC '21: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing Companion
• ISBN: 978-1-4503-9163-4
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3492323.3495626
• Keywords: Blockchain; smart contracts; Inter- Planetary file system (IPFS); data privacy; General data protection regulation (GDPR)
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2826429