The SuperNova Awards recognize organizations, teams and individuals who successfully apply emerging and disruptive technologies for their organizations. Indicio wins for work with SITA, government of Aruba.
By Trevor Butterworth
Indicio was presented with a SuperNova Award during a gala dinner on Wednesday evening at Constellation Research’s Connected Enterprise event hosted at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, California. The prestigious award, now in its twelfth year, recognized Indicio for being a leader in adopting disruptive technology in the area of Digital Safety, Governance and Privacy. Indicio CEO Heather Dahl accepted the award on behalf of Indicio.
The SuperNova reflected Indicio’s ground-breaking work to create seamless travel solutions using open source decentralized identity technology. Working with SITA, the world’s leading provider of IT to the air transport industry, and the government of Aruba, Indicio began by tackling the challenge of reopening Aruba, a tourism dependent economy, to air travel during the pandemic.
Using verifiable credentials supported by decentralized identifiers and Indicio’s global blockchain network, visitors were able to receive tamper-proof digital credentials containing their health data from a Health Information Exchange or a test lab — in this case, proof of a Covid-19 test or vaccination — and share that information through a mobile device app with full consent in a privacy-preserving way to enter the island and access event and hospitality spaces.
The solution avoided the need for direct integrations between health providers and airlines or airports or government departments — or having to use third-party management of personal information. The privacy-by-design nature of the solution made data privacy compliance simple: travelers held their own data and shared it by consent. As the project progressed, travelers were able to present their health data with their travel documents and be cleared for travel before they arrived at the airport.
Steve Wilson, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, focusing on digital identity and privacy.
While the solution was built on open source Hyperledger Aries and Hyperledger Indy codebases, it involved Indicio creating many customized components. These were donated by SITA to Linux Foundation Public Health to create the Cardea Project, a complete open source system for public health authorities to share health data in a privacy preserving way.
The success of this project has now led Indicio and SITA to create the first verifiable credential based on the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)’s protocol and standards for a Digital Travel Credential (DTC). This will transform the experience of travel by dramatically simplifying check in and border control while providing assurance of identity in a privacy preserving way.
“This is fantastic recognition for the team at Indicio, who have put in a tremendous amount of effort to build this technology,” said Heather Dahl, CEO of Indicio. “It also recognizes SITA and the government of Aruba for their vision of privacy-preserving digital travel — a vision that can be summarized in one, compelling view of what the airport of the near future looks like: no lines, no queues. And it recognizes Indicio’s Network Consortium, customers, and collaborators, all of whom are driving digital transformation through development and adoption of open source verifiable credential technology.”
“This is a technology that revives Web 2.0 — rescues it from the chronic problems of fraud and verification that are paralyzing business and the public sector,” said Ken Ebert, CTO of Indicio. “And it provides an indispensable verification and privacy layer for building Web3 applications and infrastructure. We can’t move forward without a reliable way to verify who we are engaging with online and the ability to trust the provenance and integrity of data. Open source decentralized identity technology solves these problems and gets us to the next level without having to rebuild everything that we already have. Speaking for the engineering team at Indicio, we are immensely grateful and honored to receive this award from Constellation Research.”
To learn more about how you can implement verifiable credentials to create verifiable data at any scale, check out Proven, Indicio’s flagship product — and contact us to schedule a demo or find out how our experts can help you create value from verifiable data.
