Decentralized Global Trust Registry Platform for Trust Discovery and Verification of e-Health Credentials Using TRAIN

The global COVID-19 pandemic has shown us the requisite efficacy of e-Health Credentials (COVID-19 vaccine certificates), including how they can be created quickly in compliance with different technical requirements of defined safety standards. But things get more complicated as soon as those certificates leave their state or country. A global pandemic requires e-health certificates that are valid globally so that a person’s health status can be demonstrated and verified reliably across national borders. To issue and validate the certificates globally, a secured Trust Registry platform is needed by which one can discover and verify the trustworthiness of e-Health credentials. This paper proposes a new decentralized trust registry platform which can be used to issue and validate e-Health certificates on a global scale, an approach based on Domain Name System (DNS) using TRAIN (TRust mAnagement INfrastructure). Decentralized trust registry platform also facilitates individual trust decisions through the discovery of trust lists so that verifiers can perform informed trust decisions about issued e-Health credentials. The proposed decentralized trust registry platform also helps to integrate existing trust frameworks into the platform so that they can be accessed globally. This paper also provides a demonstration on how this trust registry platform could be used for trust discovery and verification of COVID-19 certificates. The Trust registry platform is not restricted to specific identity ecosystems, rather it can support both legacy PKI and SSI Identity ecosystems.