COVID-19 Certificates for All

COVID-19 has caused a severe shock to the UK economy. Millions of people have been furloughed, thousands have died, and many more hospitalized. The virus is highly infectious and people are rightly cautious about returning to "life as normal" if they cannot be assured that the people they come into close contact with are not infectious and do not pose a significant risk to their health. As the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change stated in its August 2020 report 'Taking the UK's Testing Strategy to the Next Level',"_The UK should commit to an objective of rolling out mass testing before the end of 2020_". The report identifies five pillars for achieving this, the fifth one-being that the results from the different testing suppliers should be fed into a single national database, which will lead to health passports for every individual. Our project will provide the basis for these health passports (which we call COVID-19 certificates). Our system will allow everyone, regardless of their age or technical ability, to show they are less of a risk to themselves and others. We will do this by: * enhancing our application independent Verifiable Credentials middleware to become "all-inclusive", so that it can be used by anyone for any application in any domain, * enhancing East Kent University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (EKUHFT)'s COVID-19 test database to strongly identify the patients who take the tests, * integrating the above two systems together to provide a COVID-19 "health passport" application, * using our integrated system as an exemplar for other NHS Trusts to adopt, * working with NHS-X to integrate the different COVID-19 certificate systems together so that they can form a national interworking system. Verifiable Credentials are the topic of a new World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation and describe the content and structure of cryptographically-secure and privacy-protecting credentials to represent such things as: credit cards, passports, vaccination certificates, driving licenses etc. Prior to starting this project we have already built a proof of concept verifiable credentials infrastructure containing a dummy database to simulate those of real issuers. Our middleware supports people with smartphones, laptops or other computing devices, but not those without any device. In this project we will replace the dummy database by an enhanced version of the existing EKUHFT database, which was built at very short notice in March 2020\. It only contains the person's mobile phone number, so that the test results can be returned by SMS. But it has no validated knowledge of the identity of the tested people, which we will add in this project. Using the principles of "inclusion-by-design" our COVID certificates will be available to everyone without smartphones: the old, infirm, illiterate, blind, poor etc. Power of Attourney certificates will be available for the incapacitated. Once we have built the integrated system we will perform live trials with people in real business settings. We have the following use cases: patients being discharged from hospital into a care home, people visiting business such as dentists, hotels, and restaurants via public transport.