NFC-Blockchain Based COVID-19 Immunity Certificate: Proposed System and Emerging Issues

Vaccine requirements are becoming more mandatory in several countries as public health experts and governments become more concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic and its variants. In the meantime, as the number of vaccine requirements grows, so does the counterfeiting of vaccination documents. Fake vaccination certificates are steadily growing, being sold online and on the dark web. Due to the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need of robust authentication mechanisms that support touch-less technologies like Near Field Communication (NFC). Thus, in this paper, a blockchain-NFC based COVID-19 Digital Immunity Certificate (DIC) system is proposed. The vaccination data are first encrypted by the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm on Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and then uploaded to the blockchain. The proposed system is based on the amalgamation of NCF and blockchain technologies which can mitigate the issue of fake vaccination certificates. Furthermore, the emerging issues of employing the proposed system are discussed with future directions.