A Privacy-Preserving Platform for Recording COVID-19 Vaccine Passports

TL;DR

This paper presents a decentralized, blockchain-based platform utilizing IPFS for secure, scalable, and GDPR-compliant digital COVID-19 vaccine passports, addressing trust and interoperability challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture combining IPFS and blockchain to enhance security, scalability, and privacy in digital vaccine certification systems.

Findings

Platform ensures no single point of failure.

System complies with GDPR requirements.

Scalability tested on IPFS and blockchain networks.

Abstract

Digital vaccine passports are one of the main solutions which would allow the restart of travel in a post COVID-19 world. Trust, scalability and security are all key challenges one must overcome in implementing a vaccine passport. Initial approaches attempt to solve this problem by using centralised systems with trusted authorities. However, sharing vaccine passport data between different organisations, regions and countries has become a major challenge. This paper designs a new platform architecture for creating, storing and verifying digital COVID-19 vaccine certifications. The platform makes use of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to guarantee there is no single point of failure and allow data to be securely distributed globally. Blockchain and smart contracts are also integrated into the platform to define policies and log access rights to vaccine passport data while ensuring all actions are audited and verifiably immutable. Our proposed platform realises General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements in terms of user consent, data encryption, data erasure and accountability obligations. We assess the scalability and performance of the platform using IPFS and Blockchain test networks.