Digital vaccine certification systems

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a disruptive element for the past two years in the world. People are experiencing fatigue in having to deal with the pandemic and the measures to control it. As a result, governments are exploring ways to resume daily life while ensuring the safety of the public. One measure that has been proposed is the use of vaccine passports, a.k.a., Digital Vaccine Certification (DVC) systems, in which individuals are issued a digital document stating their vaccination status, which can be verified by external parties depending on different contexts, e.g., before entering a restaurant or while admitted into a hospital. Yet, many individuals have expressed concern about or outright refused to use said DVC systems. For instance, existing solutions in the literature are designed using a technology built for deregulation and transparency, e.g., blockchains, but health records require regulation and privacy. This results in sensitive vaccination data being wrongly shared with external parties and users lacking ownership over the data. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel DVC system that enables users to control what information can be released depending upon whom that information is released to, e.g., hospitals, schools, restaurants, etc., thus effectively granting users full control and effective ownership of their vaccination data. To determine the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we have envisioned a use case study to measure the change in responses about acceptance and use rates. By placing access control of the users’ data in their hands, we expect that users, once they are trained to effectively use our approach, will be less likely to leak their data to wrong individuals or organizations.