Worldwide there are numerous public and private initiatives to facilitate free movement during the COVID-19 pandemic, to start meeting people, go to events and to allow travel.
What many have in common is that a user needs to provide proof that she is vaccinated or has a recent negative test result. Examples of international initiatives include Travel Pass, EU Digital Green Certificate, the WHO Smart Vaccination Certificate, the CommonPass and initiatives by the Biden administration. All to ensure to ensure that people can travel safely and engage in social events again, with minimal restrictions.
Typically, these COVID-19 test passports or vaccination passports work on the basis of a privacy friendly binding of a person to a vaccination certificate or test certificate. These certificates are issued by health organisations and can be verified easily, for example, by the likes of border control, when entering an event or at check-in, by scanning a QR code. This proof can a separate app, a mobile wallet or a paper document. The Digital Green Certificate the EU Commission proposes is an example thereof, supported by a trust framework to define the standards and rules to comply with.
"ReadID is an essential component to implement ID binding and ID verification COVID passports"
ReadID can help in the binding of a person to this certificate. We are involved in several initiatives already, for example in the Netherlands via the IDA app in the Fieldlab Events / uNLock pilots, and are open to join others. Our ReadID NFC-based mobile identification technology is very scalable, trustworthy and instant, allowing it to scale to the huge numbers that these initiatives need.
How can ReadID help?
These certificates or passports need to be trusted for the system to work, and an important part of this is to make sure the person that was vaccinated or tested is the same person that is presenting the proof. We refer to this as identity binding. In addition, because of the large volumes this needs to be done efficiently, with minimal chance of human error that would happen when entering name and date of birth into a system by hand or via Optical Character Recognition technology.
When doing the test or getting the vaccination, ReadID can verify the identity of the user and have the correct information. Users can do this self-service in an app by reading the NFC chip of their own identity document or a professional from the health organisation can do this.
When presenting the proof, ReadID can be used to check if the proof corresponds to the person presenting this proof.
Details
The proof can take different forms, the most obviously as a dedicated app, a mobile wallet like app sharing verifiable credentials (self-sovereign identity) or a simple physical document that is tamper proof, for example, by using a signed QR code. In all three cases the proof can contain personal information identifying the user (name, date of birth), but in case of an app this can also be the high-resolution face image from the chip in the identity document. The latter allows checking the proof without getting access to the name of the person and is likely more efficient. ReadID can support all of these cases.
Why trust ReadID for COVID-19 passports?
ReadID technology is trusted: scalable to hundreds of thousands of scans per day, secure at eIDAS level high, user friendly as was shown in the UK Home Office EU Settlement Scheme, and easy to integrate or implement, as was shown by the Rabobank in the Dutch COVID-19 Fieldlab experiments.
Please contact us if you’d like to explore how we could help your initiative. ReadID can be delivered in a special client-only package, to allow quick integration at very low cost levels. We want to help here, not make a profit.
