BLING – Blockchain in Government

Certificate App 

About BLING project:

New technologies usually present new ways to develop and deliver services that benefit the local community and government. However, we can’t find out how practical these new technologies are until we try them out. As deploying those technologies at scale can sometimes have unintended consequences, piloting use-cases makes sense.

In the BLING project, partners – both academic partners and municipal partners – from seven different Northern-European countries are assessing how they can improve processes in their Governments or municipalities by applying the unique properties of blockchain technology to either improve existing services or to develop innovative new services that lever the technology’s unique properties. Every partner has chosen at least one use-case to design a blockchain-enabled service solution which can be tested in a local pilot study.

In this regard, university of Oldenburg, VLBA (Very Large Business Applications) is one of the knowledge partners in BLING. VLBA with cooperation of the Oldenburg municipality conducted a project, called ‘certificate app’ to make sex-worker’s registration certificate reliably verifiable while ensuring the privacy.

Research motivation:

From the estimated more than 400,000 sex-workers in Germany only less than 40,00 were registered by the end of 2019. According to the federal office of statistics in Germany. One of the reasons that prostitutes do not follow the law and register themselves is that they have concerns about the data, they expose via the registration. They do not know what happens to their data. Another problem mentioned by the Oldenburg municipality, is about certificates forgery. The certificates at the moment are issued in paper form and they are susceptible to get forged. Therefore, another objective is to address the issue.

Von den geschätzten 400.000 Sexarbeiterinnen und Sexarbeitern in Deutschland waren bis Ende 2019 nur weniger als 40.00 registriert. Das teilt das Statistische Bundesamt in Deutschland mit. Einer der Gründe, warum sich Sexarbeiter/innen nicht an das Gesetz halten und sich registrieren lassen, ist, dass sie Bedenken bezüglich der Daten haben, die sie durch die Registrierung preisgeben. Sie wissen nicht, was mit ihren Daten passiert. Ein weiteres Problem, auf das die Stadt Oldenburg hinweist, ist die Fälschung von Zertifikaten. Die Zertifikate werden derzeit noch in Papierform ausgestellt und sind fälschungsanfällig. Unser weiteres Ziel ist es daher, dieses Problem anzugehen.

Our solution provides the following advantages:

• Ensures the accuracy, integrity, and source of the certificates, while also maintaining the sex-worker’s privacy – particularly if they want to use an alias.
• It provides a way to prove that the sex-worker’s health certificate is up to date, without compromising the privacy
• In our solution the sex-worker is the owner of the certificate – they are the only person that holds the cryptographic key which points to the certificate. They cannot change the content of the certificates, but as the owner of the certificate they can revoke the access to it when they want to – which supports their right to be forgotten.

Technology:

As we need an open access we will use a public blockchain. Since we don’t want to deal with any cryptocurrency in public sector, we used IOTA distributed ledger. On IOTA, since every transactions validates two other transactions, the transactions doesn’t costs free. However, all the transactions are visible to the public. Ensuring the privacy is one of the pillars in our research. Therefore,we used channel structure under IOTA protocol to make transactions just visible upon request and to the authorized verifies.

More details about this research can be found under the published paper.

Author:

Ali Amin Rezaei

Date:
26.06.2022

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