As we speak, UK’s The Open University (OU) unveiled a prototype of a cellular app that certifies COVID-19 immunity check outcomes utilizing blockchain. The answer is at the moment in testing and permits verification of check outcomes and vaccination certificates.
The mission goals to allow well being employees and others to provide a tamper-proof immunity passport to allow them to return to work. So assessments can be carried out by medical doctors or pharmacists, and also you’d have to show your identification they usually’d challenge a digital immunity passport, in case you have antibodies.
An fascinating facet is the expertise that’s used. Tim Berners-Lee, often known as the inventor of the World Vast Net, has an answer referred to as a Solid Pod, the place the Pod is a ‘private on-line information’ retailer. It combines an identification and different information – even photographs. The idea is you possibly can have private data which is decentralized or lives individually to apps, in order that the app firm doesn’t management your information.
For the needs of the open college mission, a Pod would retailer the immunity passport. And pods use the W3C Verifiable Credentials normal.
However then what stops an individual simply taking a duplicate of another person’s immunity passport, altering the identify and including it to their very own Pod? That’s the place blockchain is available in. When the immunity passport is created and added to the Pod, a hash or fingerprint of the certificates is saved on the consortium blockchain.
Final month the college printed a paper in regards to the expertise.
The blockchain additionally acts as a public key registry for signing transactions.
Therefore, with the app developed by the Open College, when somebody checks the immunity passport, within the background, it checks that the hash of the certificates matches the hash created when the passport was issued.
“Like many researchers, the OU’s blockchain workforce have been extremely motivated to contribute to resolving this international pandemic. We’ve been taking a look at how our current expertise may very well be repurposed to assist immunity certification,” mentioned Professor John Domingue, director of the Information Media Institute.
“Our app, constructing on a number of years of analysis into decentralised certification, is quickly scalable, relevant generically, and ready within the wings for immunity testing to be in full impact.”
In the meantime, Evernym, ID2020, uPort, Microsoft, ConsenSys Well being and a number of other different corporations got here collectively to launch the COVID Credentials initiative (CCI). The group is growing immunity passports on the blockchain.
Amongst different tasks, Google and Apple are growing a contact tracing resolution. IoT blockchain platform Nodle.io has launched a contact tracing app that makes use of Bluetooth to report encounters with close by telephones and their house owners.
