Verifiable Proof of Health using Public Key Cryptography
This work addresses the problem of securely and privately verifying COVID-19 test results for public health authorities and individuals, which is an incremental step in digital health verification.
The paper proposes an end-to-end COVID-19 test result verification protocol using public key cryptography. This system aims to enable secure and private verification of testing status to facilitate the safe reopening of public places and potentially allow for more targeted lockdowns.
In the current pandemic, testing continues to be the most important tool for monitoring and curbing the disease spread and early identification of the disease to perform health-related interventions like quarantine, contact tracing and etc. Therefore, the ability to verify the testing status is pertinent as public places prepare to safely open. Recent advances in cryptographic tools have made it possible to build a secure and resilient digital-id system. In this work, we propose to build an end to end COVID-19 results verification protocol that takes privacy, computation, and other practical concerns into account for designing an inter-operable layer of testing results verification system that could potentially enable less stringent and more selective lockdowns. We also discuss various concerns encompassing the security, privacy, ethics and equity aspect of the proposed system.