COVID Immunity Badges
Last week, Transmute found ourselves mentioned in the middle of a hilarious media spin that put some select tech leaders in the middle of a pandemic conspiracy. But there is always some truth in comedy, and in this case, Bill Gate’s prediction that “digital certificates” will play a critical role in balancing the paradox we are facing — where we as a collective must find a way to simultaneously defeat an invisible viral enemy by remaining indefinitely apart and restart our economy.
If we had a way to prove which of us were immune and/or carriers, then our economy would have some definitive life-support, and alongside perpetual social distancing efforts, we’d continue to progressively “flatten the curve.”
However, the reality is that we are in a reactive state today with our healthcare professionals stepping up to this unprecedented challenge on the front lines. We have deep gratitude for the risks they take and care they provide daily. And, we hope to soon transition to a more proactive state, enabling us to slowly re-open the economy while protecting human life.
There are several dependencies for this transition, including:
- Access to safe testing in high volumes (currently in progress, not yet available)
- Reliable process to establish immunity (currently not available, testing and vaccine development in progress)
- Ability to share this health information with individuals in a privacy-preserving, verifiable way.
Experts including doctors, public officials, scientists, human rights defenders, and others are actively working on each of these areas, but much is still unknown.
At Transmute, we are best positioned to contribute towards solutions for the third dependency with our technology and understanding of data privacy needs.
Today, issuing paper credentials to represent a person’s antibody test results is insufficient. Not only can COVID19 live on paper surfaces for up to 5 days, but this credential issuance method is far too slow at scale. And simply brute-forcing our way into people’s biology and health data through increased government surveillance [a la Patriot Act-style] would not sustain our democracy. Both our individual identities and our national identity are at stake. This problem requires something better — a digital, opt-in solution: verifiable credentials.
Verifiable credentials are digital representations of real life achievements, qualifications, or attributes that are exceedingly difficult to forge or replicate. Their contained data can be selectively shared via a digital, contactless method in real time at scale. Verifiable credentials are incredibly practical in situations with inherent distribution of diverse actors who must be able to safely share information to achieve collective success.
Over the last few years, Transmute has been applying this technology to global supply chain use cases; you can learn more about this work here. We also see an immediate application of this technology for the current pandemic, where healthcare providers and individuals must work together to flatten the curve of the virus.
Since the DID community at large is coming together to actualize this solution, we wanted to contribute our starting point when considering the “COVID immunity badge” solution. We see multiple workflows that may leverage verifiable credentials to communicate test results.
One option that is familiar to healthcare providers today includes providing a QR code and/or simple pin to an individual when they complete drive-up testing. That individual can present a driver license at that time to establish their identity. The subsequently provided information (QR/ pin) allows that individual to later authenticate on a specified website and access test results. These results can be structured as a verifiable credential, which can be discovered and verified in the future by that individual showing their drivers license and providing the pin. This workflow doesn’t require the individual to download any software or manage their own decentralized identifier.
There are also more technical workflows that allow a higher level of security and user control. We created a technical demonstration of how a fully digital COVID credential exchange might occur using decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, and a mechanism for exchange called CHAPI (Credential Handler API). Click through the demo here.
More technical details and community work can be found here:
https://w3c-ccg.github.io/vc-examples/covid-19/ https://github.com/decentralized-identity/c19-vc.com
Please provide feedback, use and share your adaptations to the code to let us know what’s working in the wild! Our hope is to use our expertise in business process improvement and verifiable credentials tech to accelerate impact.
