The Good Health Pass Collaborative, a group of organisations with an aim to help restore international travel with privacy-protecting digital health passes, has published its Interoperability Blueprint, proposing a “privacy-preserving alternative to vaccination certificates.”
Developed over the past six months with contributions including 125 global organisations, a set of principles and standards for digital health passes have been published by the collaborative.
Earlier in the year the group warned that, “to be valuable to users, [digital health] credentials need to be accepted at check-in, upon arrival by border control agencies – even with multiple systems – as long as solutions adhere to open standards and participate in a common governance framework. But without these, fragmentation is inevitable, and travellers – and the economy –will continue to suffer needlessly as a result.”
The Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint proposes a format for digital health passes, which applies full data minimisation, and signs each data field separately. This is said to “allow a verifier to request only the fields they absolutely need without compromising trust in the authenticity of the data.”
The publication of the Blueprint comes days after the World Health Organization released new technical specifications and implementation guidance for vaccination certificates for COVID-19, the full guidance can be found here.
The proposed standards from the Good Health Pass Collaborative focuses on ‘data minimisation’, aiming to limit the amount of data included in certificates. The document highlights: “Called “selective disclosure”, this design allows digital health passes to significantly reduce the amount of personally identifiable information and private health information being shared with airlines or other verifiers. It provides travellers with greater transparency about what data they are consenting to share while simultaneously reducing liability exposure for airlines.”
The Blueprint includes topics covering design principles, creating a consistent user experience, standard data models and elements, credential formats, signatures, and exchange protocols, security, privacy, and data protection, trust registries, rules engines and identity binding (ensuring the authenticity of the holder).
Christine Leong, Global Blockchain Identity Lead, at Accenture, one of the contributors, commented: “The Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint has the potential to facilitate greater collaboration between governments and industries, allowing the exchange of information among an ecosystem of stakeholders, in a way that preserves privacy and builds an environment of trusted interactions. This is critical today as we return to work, travel and events. We are proud to be a part of the next phase of this important initiative as the proposed standards pave the way for more informed, seamless and convenient interactions.”
View the Interoperability Blueprint here.
