SSI COVID Passports: Why, What and How
This article assumes that you already know what self-sovereign identity is. It will build on this knowledge to show one possible use case of this technology in the healthcare industry: COVID passports.
What are COVID Passports and Why do we need them?
Due to the public controversy around COVID passports, this can be a loaded question. Add to that the rumors and conspiracy theories that have surrounded and somehow continue to float around COVID-19 in different communities around the world. While I do not have the medical background or authority to confirm or deny any of it, here is what we all know for sure and without denial: We know that many of us lost dear ones to this virus, and many of us suffered its symptoms, or at least know someone who have suffered from it. We also know that this virus is highly contagious. So, regardless of our personal views, we need to take some extra precautions to ensure we do not fall into crises like the one that recently took place in India, for example. Those precautions include social distancing, quarantine, and isolation of the infected and those who were in close contact with the infected.
When practically applying these safety measures, we find that we need to be able to easily and quickly do the following steps:
1. Determine the COVID status for the person: a purely medical procedure that states the information about the person’s COVID test results or vaccinations.
2. Issue personal proofs with the COVID status for each person.
3. Allow the person to share their COVID information with the entities that they consent.
4. Allow different entities to verify the authenticity of a given COVID status.
These steps have become monotonous procedures in the lives of people and organizations. Presenting proofs of immunity, or proofs of negative test results, is now a necessity to access many major services and places. One of the first services that spawned the use of such proofs was the air travel industry; after which these proofs were called “COVID passports”.
The need to digitize COVID Passports
In a lot of places around the world, a COVID passport is simply a paper document. This has led to a couple of expected problems, one to mention is forgery. Paper documents can easily be forfeited, and paper-based COVID passports are no exception.
Another major concern is privacy. Identity verification needs to be done when verifying a paper-based COVID passport to ensure that the presented COVID passport was issued for the intended holder. As a result, people will have to present identity documents alongside the COVID certificates. In an even worse scenario, those who cannot have the vaccine due to specific health conditions will be required to disclose this sensitive information about themselves. For many people, revealing personal and sensitive information to access places and services; like malls, restaurants, cinemas, etc., is just not acceptable. It is considered as an intolerable violation of privacy. In fact, COVID passports did trigger civil unrest in some countries. It goes without saying that a violation of privacy is a threat to freedom. And, certainly, staying safe shouldn’t be at the cost of freedom.
To wrap it up, paper-based COVID passports — though still used in many places around the world- are not good enough. That’s why we have seen the rise of digital COVID passports.
Fortunately, technologies like self-sovereign identity(SSI) can help us work things out with COVID without violating privacy.
SSI-Based COVID Passports
It is true that with the use of digital COVID passports, the probability of forfeiting a test result or a vaccination is almost zero. However, digitalization of and in itself does not guarantee to protect people’s information. Even with the passport now stored in your mobile app, you will still need to reveal some piece of identity matching information to prove that you are the intended passport holder. I have seen some COVID passport implementations that go as far as tracking your geographical location, under the excuse of notifying you if you crossed paths with a newly discovered case. There are a bunch of already in-use COVID passport apps that display users’ full names, dates of birth, identity numbers and other personal information that is unnecessary to prove neither the authenticity nor the ownership of the passports.
What if people can prove their COVID status to different entities, prove that they are authentic and prove they were intended for them, without having to reveal any of their personal information; not even their names?
This is possible with the help of self-sovereign identity (SSI). As the name suggests, self-sovereign means users own their data. SSI can give users full control of what parts of their data they want to share and with whom to share it. And because SSI uses strong cryptography alongside with zero-knowledge proofs, we can ensure that the COVID information being shared by an individual is correct, has not been altered, and was issued by the entity it claims to be issued by — regardless of the level of credibility of the issuer. To solve the identity link problem, fingerprint and/or face recognition can be used to verify that the COVID information being shared belongs to the device holder claiming the information to be theirs. This way we can ensure information privacy and security and at the same time fulfill safety procedures.
Now, the question that logically rises to the top of our minds is: If SSI-based COVID passports can solve the problems frowned upon by many, why haven’t we seen — yet- mass adoption of this idea? To answer this question, we need to understand that SSI is a fairly new technology. From one side, there are difficulties related to healthcare regulation bodies; namely their tendency and agility to adopt a cutting-edge technology like SSI, especially after the chaos COVID caused — and continues to cause- particularly in this sector. From another side, there are questions related to the maturity of the technology itself; especially in regard to portability and interoperability, and whether or not it is stable enough to build upon a project of this size. It is true there has been a number of initiatives and aggregate efforts to build a large-scale SSI solution for the COVID passport issue. But these efforts are yet to be deployed in real life. As a matter of fact, none of these initiatives are officially released for mass adoption as of the writing of this article. The key to mass adoption is the approval of healthcare authorities in public sectors that remains in the hands of government decision makers.
