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Release of the Good Health Pass (GHP) Interoperability Blueprint

By August 12, 2021August 13th, 2021News

The Trust Over IP (ToIP) Foundation together with the Good Health Pass Collaborative (GHPC) today announced the release of the Good Health Pass (GHP) Interoperability Blueprint V1.0.0 (PDF). Produced by over 125 participating companies and organizations spanning global travel, health, cybersecurity, privacy, and government, the Blueprint is an urgently needed solution that describes how to unify the widely disparate set of digital vaccination certificate solutions on the market.

“Over the past several months, different vaccination certificate formats have been announced by at least a dozen different governments, health authorities, and industry consortia around the world, including the European Union’s Digital COVID Certificate and the World Health Organisation’s Digital Document of COVID-19 Certificates,” said John Jordan, Executive Director of the ToIP Foundation. “Each of these is good and valuable in its own right, however because they are designed to be digital health documents, they share more information than is necessary simply to prove one’s COVID-19 status for purposes of travel or entry to a venue. The Good Health Pass Blueprint was designed from the ground up to provide an international trust framework that addresses the need for a simple, secure, standard, privacy-preserving health pass that works anywhere you need to prove your health status, just like a mobile boarding pass works with any airline.”

The Good Health Pass effort began with the Good Health Pass Collaborative (GHPC) organized by ID2020, a non-profit organization focused on ethical digital identity. In February 2021, GHPC published the Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint Outline, which specified the key problems that needed to be solved and the core design principles that needed to be followed. GHPC then formed a partnership with the ToIP Foundation to launch the Interoperability Working Group for Good Health Pass. Working Group leadership and cross-industry expertise were also contributed by Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH), particularly its COVID Credentials Initiative (CCI). This combined effort resulted in a fully open and transparent process that created the full Blueprint in under eight weeks.

After a public review period during June with stakeholders in air travel, government, healthcare, hospitality, and other affected sectors, the Blueprint was finalized in mid-July for final approval and publication. “Publication of the V1.0.0 Blueprint is just the first step in seeing interoperable privacy preserving digital health passes adopted in order to support people being able to gather together again with lower personal and public health risk,” said Kaliya Young, chair of the Working Group and Ecosystems Director at CCI. “Our next task is collaborating with real world implementers to fill in any remaining gaps to get to an interoperable system and working with LFPH and other partners to deliver open source code that can be deployed.”

Judith Fleenor, Director of Strategic Engagements at the ToIP Foundation, adds “The best news is that the Good Health Pass Blueprint does not compete with or replace any of the publicly announced COVID-19 health certificates. It is compatible with all of them—and others still to come. With the right software, all those health certificates can be ingested and verified in order to issue a Good Health Pass-compliant health pass. This focus on interoperability will make life much simpler and safer for both users and verifiers.”

The ToIP Foundation is especially proud of this effort because it demonstrates how applying the core principles of interoperable digital trust architecture solves global problems and builds confidence in solutions that have data integrity, portability, and confidentiality built-in. This is the fundamental motivation for creating the ToIP Stack, the ToIP Foundation’s model for developing privacy-preserving, interoperable, and decentralized digital identity solutions that form and sustain digital trust relationships.

The high-speed collaboration enabled by the Interoperability Working Group for Good Health Pass also illustrates the value of the antitrust and royalty-free intellectual property rights protections that all our Working Groups enjoy as a Linux Foundation (LF) project. “Good Health Pass is a textbook example of the kind of project the LF was formed to support,” said Brian Behlendorf, LF General Manager of Healthcare, Blockchain, and Identity. “Being able to bring together this many global experts to work so intensively in such a short period is unprecedented—and shows the kind of confidence that the LF has built in an open public collaboration process.”

We encourage you to review the Blueprint, endorse it, and adopt it—and to join the Interoperability Working Group for Good Health Pass if you would like to collaborate with other industry leaders in creating the world’s first privacy-preserving health credential interoperability framework.