Paper 2021/704

IBM Digital Health Pass Whitepaper: A Privacy-Respectful Platform for Proving Health Status

Elli Androulaki, Ilie Circiumaru, Jesus Diaz Vico, Miguel Prada, Alessandro Sorniotti, Marc Stoecklin, Marko Vukolic, and Marie Wallace

Abstract

IBM Digital Health Pass (IDHP) is a technology developed by IBM offering the technical infrastructure to allow individuals to prove their COVID19-related health status (e.g., whether that individual was tested negative for COVID19, has been partially/fully vaccinated, or recovered from COVID19) to third parties in a secure and privacy-respectful way. In a nutshell, IBM Digital Health Pass technology enables issuers, i.e., authorised healthcare providers onboarded to the system by health authorities of a given country or jurisdiction, to produce digital attestations about individuals’ health status. These attestations, called Health Certificates are issued to individuals, called subjects or holders, and are stored on a piece of paper or within subjects’ mobile phone wallets. Subjects can then demonstrate the authenticity of one or more of their Health Certificates to third parties of their choice called verifiers, when the necessity of demonstrating COVID19 related health status arises. Subjects can also demonstrate their association with each of their Health Certificates. IBM Digital Health Pass is built around preserving individuals’ privacy as a first-class requirement, based on established public key cryptography concepts in a way that can easily scale to millions of Health Certificates.