Highly private blockchain-based management system for digital COVID-19 certificates.

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Cybersecurity
• Blockchain Technology

Background:

• The COVID-19 pandemic spurred the development of digital health certificates.
• Existing blockchain solutions for digital COVID-19 certificates often fail to meet stringent privacy, security, and regulatory requirements.
• Ensuring patient data control, preventing forgery, and enabling easy verification are critical challenges.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and implement a protocol for managing digital COVID-19 certificates that addresses limitations of previous proposals.
• To achieve data sovereignty, high privacy, forgery avoidance, and secure verification.
• To establish a regulated system for certificate generation and validation.

Main Methods:

• Integration of a proxy re-encryption (PRE) service with a blockchain-based protocol.
• Implementation of a hierarchical system allowing individual users to control private data sharing.
• Introduction of a regulatory authority to oversee certificate-generating centers.

Main Results:

• The protocol successfully ensures individual users' control over their private health data (data sovereignty).
• It provides a high level of privacy and security, mitigating the risk of certificate forgery.
• The system supports two distinct validation methods for registered and non-registered verification entities.

Conclusions:

• The proposed protocol effectively integrates PRE and blockchain to manage digital COVID-19 certificates.
• It meets essential requirements including data sovereignty, privacy, security, forgery avoidance, and ease of verification.
• The system establishes a regulated framework for digital health certificate management.