Community Newsletter

Project Spotlight: Safe in Sisters

Safe in Sisters, one of CCI’s participating projects, is a local contact tracing application for COVID-19. Developed by Michael Corning, who is the Cryptocosm Architect at Secours.io and a co-lead of CCI’s Use Case Implementation workstream, the Safe in Sisters app is designed to help reopen the economy at the local level without “reopening” the pandemic. The app is called Safe in Sisters because Michael lives in Sisters, Oregon where he has focused much of his efforts.

Here is how it works. When you enter a “room” such as your office, the local coffee shop, or the local nursing home, you would push a button on the app to check-in to that room. You do the same when you check-out. If you were to be diagnosed with COVID-19, you would go to the app and quickly notify the rooms that you were in for the past two weeks (by clicking a button) that you could have possibly exposed others in that room to the virus. The room manager then sends an alert to all of the people that were in the room at the same time that you were in the room, alerting them to the incident. The issuing and verifying of COVID-19 test results through verifiable credentials are supported by Trinsic’s APIs, which you can learn more about here.

Michael has partnered with another CCI participating company, Enduring Net, for this project. If you are interested in learning more about the Safe in Sisters app, please contact michael@secours.io.

CCI's Knowledge Base

CCI Workstream Updates

Use Case Implementation

The CCI Use Case Implementation group had its 15^th meeting on September 1^st, 2020. Two use case implementations were demonstrated to the group.

Josh Mandel, MD (Chief Architect for Microsoft Healthcare and SMART Health IT) presented the SMART Health Cards Framework. Health Cards defines a way to share and manage clinical data including immunizations and laboratory results for COVID-19. The term “card” is used as a consumer-facing alternative to “verifiable credential”. The implementation is based on standardized Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources APIs (FHIR), an open standard for healthcare developed by Health Level 7. Dr. Mandel demonstrated how a user can obtain and share a "COVID Card" using the DID-SIOP protocol based on OpenID Conenct, leveraging the ion DID method for peer-to-peer as well as blockchain-anchored identifiers. The framework supports minimal disclosure for privacy by tailoring credential contents to specific use cases. The framework specification is available here, with issue tracking and spec development managed here. An open-source reference implementation is available here.

David Chadwick (Verifiable Credentials Ltd) presented a verifiable credential middleware architecture, including a set of APIs for issuing and verifying. Instead of DID or blockchain, state-of-the-art X.509 certificates are used for secure communication. FIDO2 is used for strong authentication between holder and issuer. All verifiable credentials are short-lived and tailor-made by the issuer for a specific verification request. This eliminates the need for selective disclosure or revocation infrastructure. Click here for a demo of the laptop version.

The next CCI Use Case Implementation meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, September 15, 16:00-17:00 CEST. The agenda includes two more demonstrations of use case implementations.

Rules & Governance

The CCI Governance Task Force has been focused on including all feedback and comments received and preparing for the versioned release of the v2 document which will be available for CCI members to review. Additionally, the members have initiated a discussion around the path to adoption of the v2 of the Governance Framework and especially the establishment of appropriate Governance Authority and roles for the same.

The members of the Task Force continue to participate in the CCI
community plans, especially around the possible future of CCI as an advocacy effort for the adoption of privacy-preserving secure verifiable credentials based systems in the healthcare sector and health information systems.
 

Coordination & Communications

We hosted a CCI all-hands call on August 28 to update the community on our conversation with Linux Foundation Public Health regarding joining or merging with them. For summary slides and the meeting recording, please visit CCI Internal Homepage. Moving forward, CCI all-hands call will be held on the last Friday of each month.

We followed up on an idea that came out of the all-hands call and organized a discussion on how to engage with key stakeholders in the context of some recent events, such as Abbot Labs' offering of mobile apps to display their COVID-19 antigen test result. The conclusion was we needed to leverage community members’ existing connections with stakeholders (e.g. issuers and verifiers) to get a better understanding of what they need to achieve and if/how they want to engage with CCI. Some have offered to talk to their contacts and help us answer these questions. If you are interested in contributing to this effort, please email Lucy Yang.

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