Are digitally encrypted certificates the way forward?
COVID-19 brought an unprecedented shift in our ability to meet, socialise and interact throughout the world. Almost overnight, we became subject to contact tracing and the need to keep social distance from everyone including family and friends. Since contact of any kind carried the risk of COVID-19 transmission, there seemed little hope of communities, countries and the world being able to reopen.
As we take steps towards the safe opening of different regions, an increasing number of governments are requiring people to provide validated proof of COVID-19 vaccinations or test results. These certifications must be verifiable and linked to official identity documents to travel, gain access to local venues or anything involving social gatherings.
The good news is there are significant advances in the ability to digitally link verified vaccination certificates and test results to an individual’s identity. Many organisations and governments are now looking to create a contactless verification process as part of this digital transformation. Importantly, they need something that will prioritise data privacy.
Issues that need solving
- Being able to trust how the data will be used and stored.
- How to protect against fraud when certificates are often hard copies only and partly handwritten.
- How to prove the certificate is tied to a specific individual.
In this series, we look at the real-world benefits of digitally verifying credentials. We discuss problems surrounding proof of identity and keeping data safe. We highlight how your customers can have peace of mind knowing their data is encrypted, never stored anywhere other than their own personal device, and can only ever be shared with their explicit instructions and consent.
Using an elegant, safe and user focused smart application that people can use to confidently gain access to venues and travel is the answer. People need security knowing that despite any requirements to provide proof of vaccination or test results, they remain in complete control of their own data. See: seven things that make self-sovereign identity different.
The contactless answer
The ability to minimise physical contact, including the handling of passports and vaccination cards, is a critical element in containing a pandemic. If existing verification processes also include fingerprint scanning and the need to type in a PIN on a publicly used device, this further increases the risks of virus transmission.
Contactless technology is the key to creating an effective solution. The main international standards organisation for the World Wide Web published the Verifiable Credentials Data Model back in 2019 which references digital certification and best practices.
ShareRing’s solution to current challenges is both innovative and simplistic. It leverages the immutability of blockchain technology to build the highest levels of security, privacy and consumer trust into a flexible digital verification system. See: the three verification levels inside the ShareRing Vault.
ShareRing has created a complete ecosystem for the issuance, ownership, and consumption of documents. For both the issuer and the consumer of the document and data, the ShareRing system provides fundamentally greater levels of confidence in the validity of the document. It eliminates the opportunity for fraudulent manipulation of data that has been uploaded onto the ShareRing blockchain platform. See: Advanced KYC Solutions.
The ShareRing app includes a Personal Identification Vault and Health document access. This allows users to safely store and easily share multiple documents, including their COVID-19 vaccination, passport, national ID card and more, in an encrypted format. None of these documents are held centrally and remain only on the individual’s personal device.
How the ecosystem works
- A vaccination centre issues the COVID-19 certificate at the point of vaccination. They send an encrypted digital copy to the user, which only the user can access using a private key. A digital fingerprint or hash of that document will be uploaded to the blockchain.
- The user receives the digital copy of the vaccination certificate from the issuer and uploads it to their Personal Information Vault on their mobile device, alongside their OCR and face matched identity document.
- A consumer of the data, for example a customs official at an airport or a ticket attendant at a venue, scans a QR code from the user’s mobile phone which, with the user’s explicit real-time consent, allows them to see the verified certificate alongside the user’s ID.
The process automatically checks the digital fingerprint on the blockchain. Even if a single pixel of the image has been altered or the document on the user’s device has been tampered with in any way, it will be rejected by the system.
Where we sit.
ShareRing has been building this technology since 2018. The encrypted Vault and self-sovereign ID model we put in the original whitepaper are the same architecture under everything we deploy today.
If you want to discuss privacy KYC at country scale, the door is open at sharering.network/contact.
By ShareRing Team of ShareRing.
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