Global COVID Certificate Network (GCCN) is an initiative at Linux Foundation Public Health, a Linux Foundation project that builds, secures, and sustains open source software to help public health authorities (PHAs) combat COVID-19 and future epidemics.
We launched GCCN in June 2021 to enable interoperable and trustworthy verification of COVID certificates between jurisdictions for safe border reopening. One of the key challenges that we aim to address through GCCN is the lack of a global trust architecture. We have seen many small and large centralized trust ecosystems, such as the EU Digital COVID Certificate Gateway, but without a further mechanism that can allow these centralized ecosystems to establish trust with each other, there won’t be interoperability at the global level.
In response to this challenge, we have made it our top priority to set up the GCCN Trust Registry Network, a mechanism for trust ecosystems to find each other and decide whether to accept each other’s certificate and a way to look up data on who is doing what and how to contact each other.
In the past months, led by John Walker, the Community Architect of our COVID Credential Initiative, and Savita Farooqui, a dedicated community volunteer, we have defined the starting definition for the Trust Registry Network and identified a suitable technical infrastructure. As we are moving forward to figure out a proper governance and business model for the Network and setting up the production-level back-end infrastructure, Savita Farooqui and her team at Symsoft Solutions help us spin up this demonstration application to start showcasing how we envision the Trust Registry Network to work.
This application is now only for demonstration purposes. It doesn’t reflect the technology choice we are going to make for the production system. The existing entries were created by our staff or community members and they don’t suggest the entities’ formal participation in the Network. We welcome anyone to try submitting entries and reach out to us at info@lfph.io if you have any questions.
GCCN Trust Registry Network - Starting Definition
The GCCN Trust Registry Network is an online resource that provides human and machine readable information pertaining to it’s network entries. Network participants consist of public and private sector entities providing the issuance and/or verification of digital or digitized paper Certificates, Credentials or Passes required for use by jurisdictions to allow free and safe movement within or across locales.
The GCCN Trust Registry Network will provide it’s users with qualitative information regarding the validity of each registry entry. It will support pre-operational discovery of any registry entry, presenting registry users with vetted descriptions for each registry entry.