Universal Pass

When global pandemics arise, we require methods to determine who needs testing, treatment, and quarantine, and who can work or travel safely. Traditional documents are easily forged, have time-limited in validity, and are inaccessible for the undocumented and refugees. Governments' tracking apps allow large-scale public health initiatives but violate individuals' rights to privacy and freedoms. In an epidemic, testing, treatment and information rapidly changes so a system is needed to provide real-time updates on individuals' health needs.

Universal Pass provides a single repository for health testing results that preserves the privacy and identity of participants while providing public health officials, businesses and individuals with the information they need to ensure the best and most updated health care is provided. Tracking risk levels and immunity status, alerting when testing is needed, and allowing them to return to work and travel safely, while minimizing the spread of disease.  

Current methods of tracking information that support public health related goals are fraught with  privacy issues which can only partially addressed by technology and by tech capabilities that have been limited by economic inequality and political jurisdictions. – a checkerboard of global privacy rules, healthcare regulations and lack of access to communication infrastructure.

Information must be shared and validated securely and privately by a provider with the ability to set their own standards of acceptance as each jurisdiction may have different requirements

Exacerbating the issue, current trust levels in both government and technology companies is near all-time lows.

This is a nearly universal problem and no society has yet implemented a fully effective solution.  

Universal Pass is an app that is used to securely record and share COVID-19 viral presence and antibody testing results while completely respecting all aspects of the users privacy.

Universal Pass data is highly sensitive and only the minimal required access is granted to a requestor.

For example, when the user needs to show their status to get into a small business accepting any form of current COVID-19 test as valid, the system will simply respond with an indicator to grant or deny the request.

If the objective is to enter a factory run by their employer, the request might be for the date of the test, the type and perhaps even the testing provider to help prevent black market testing.

In this case, rather than sharing the data with the employer, the employer sends all of the conditions of satisfaction to the system and the system collates the response into a simple grant or deny.

Thus, the effect is actuated, but without revealing the actual contents of the data.

Our target population is everyone.  Today the whole world risks either getting ill or providing detailed personal information to central government authorities who can then use that data to control them or both.

This doesn't just apply to employees of large companies, but to everyone, everywhere.  It also goes beyond COVID-19 - global human activities virtually guarantee future pandemics.  Our team has engaged global human rights advocates, Scott Carlin - the originator of the UN Global Citizen initiative and Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri a UN Women's Empowerment representative to ensure that we are aligning globally with people all over the world.

We are also reaching out to partner with health care and testing agencies all over the world to ensure that we fully understand the unique needs of each country, region and even city and that we make the system flexible enough and private enough to comply with all local regulations.

As we build out the system, we will incorporate global user feedback to cover issues from language to cultural to physical to technical.  For example - in developing nations, users will not even need their own device - the local business or government will provide the necessary hardware.

This challenge is how to prevent future pandemics.  The solution is early detection through testing, collecting data to detect, correcting errors that show up in the testing processes, sharing that information so errors can be prevented in the future, using testing results to put in place effective policies to prevent spreading, such as the quarantine of possibly infected contacts through contact tracing and most importantly, and doing all this without disrupting everything else.

Our solution enables all of these activities at a global scale, while not exposing private health care or activity data.

First - we are an empowerment tool that allows businesses and individuals to take action - not just the government.

Second, Universal Pass applies cryptography at the data element level where, by default, it viewable only by the data owner . System operators only have access to the keys that provide additional data-at-rest security using commercially available enterprise key management solutions.

Third, the solution cryptographically integrates the biometric system, the application instance, the local device and a user PIN which nearly eliminates the ability to spoof an account while not requiring that the user own the access device - this is a very advanced function that we believe has never been implemented - mutual client-server three factor authentication mathematically integrated into data element encryption.

Fourth - we are a primary source of identity.  We don't require any external validation of any type from any other organization or government.  This allows us to be of service to undocumented workers without fear of government reprisal.  Our identities cannot be faked or forged and no one can create more than one identity on the system.  This differentiates us from other identity providers such as Facebook or Google where anyone can create unlimited accounts and also from government services which are often just a card or paper.  We also can use more than one source of biometrics so we are more flexible than the national ID system of India as well as being easier to use and much more secure.

The Universal Pass application applies cryptography at the data element level where it is encrypted and viewable only by the data owner by default.  There is no such thing as administrator access. The data must either be explicitly shared with another individual or a group.  Groups are implemented as a set of rules that explicitly grant a set of individuals access independently.  Access control is maintained by the owner of a data element only. In addition, the cryptographic algorithms used are quantum-secure and are candidates for the new NIST standard.

In addition to its authentication, authorization and access management capabilities, the solution uses a proprietary big data management system that eliminates the need for a database or a shared big data solution.  This data management solution is an extension of a proprietary memory management solution that in practice increased application speed by up to 5 orders of magnitude by removing memory management completely from the programmer and letting the operating system chose how to make most efficient use of the space thereby eliminating the need for any swap space use.

Finally, the system uses a bitwise radix indexing system that ensures that finding combinations by element type scales linearly rather than exponentially as more element type matches are identified such that with a multiple element type cold search on billions of records the complete data set is retrieved in tens of microseconds.

The memory management and data management systems have been previously deployed in production trading systems for proprietary trading on the Nasdaq. 

The biometric systems are provided by Microsoft.

The key management systems have been deployed in government and commercial applications for many years. 

We use ionic as the app development platform to have a single, secure codebase for the application instead of needing to maintain multiple approaches that are hardware dependant for android and iOS.

The high performance computing environment is the same hardware used by the IBM SUMMIT supercomputer - currently the fastest supercomputer in the world.

What was missing in the past was a clear and present need to control access to vulnerable areas based upon the absence of an infectious disease.  While testing is the arbiter of access, being able to trust the source of the testing is completely missing from any of the current solutions.  In the near future, due to cost, lack of access to legitimate tests, and desperation, test results may be forged and black market testing will become the norm unless controls are put in place to ensure quality.

Our assertion is that a single system to securely and privately share disease status information globally is beneficial to all of humanity. It also has real value that businesses will pay to manage the risk that they can't manage with any of their existing identity management systems since they are limited to people who are on their payroll.

Currently - Zero

1 year - 25 million - mostly US, Uganda and some European countries

5 years - 8 Billion - Global deployment - enrollment of 80-90% of the world population

Once our COVID solution is fully deployed, we will be bringing other technology to bear and expanding our solution to cover all types of diseases, centralized health care records for the globe and plan to work with national and international health care organizations to study data that our users chose to make available to further medical research around the world.

Health care record management regulations change frequently and may require significant work to keep our system in alignment without the existence of global standards. 

Some cultures may not value privacy as highly as others, so there may be less perceived value in a solution that values privacy over government control of information.

While the early operational cost of the system is minimal, as adoption grows, the system will become more expensive to operate and change.

Pricing for the solution in some developing markets may not be feasible even if the government is paying.

If our cryptographic solution is discovered to be flawed mathematically, the cost of moving to an new solution is substantial and the security of the solution would be reduced until the migration to the new solution was completed.

Our system aims to exceed the highest requirements of the combined global privacy regulations for health care records.  This will allow us some leeway as we will meet or exceed all requirements for the foreseeable future.

In cultures where the value is perceived to be lower, we will market ourselves as a partner to the state where our clients can share relevant  information with the state while still shielding users from direct state supervision and also providing limited, relevant access to foreign visitors - something that their state based solutions cannot provide.

We are building a data center on Native American sovereign land in Oklahoma.  By owning the hardware, we can control our costs as we scale.

In developing markets, we will price the solution based upon the World Bank Purchasing Power Equivalence model such that our revenue per person in each region is adjusted for the relative economic power of the region.

We will closely monitor the development of quantum secure cryptography on an ongoing basis.  We have retained the inventor of the algorithm as an advisor and retained his team to assist in the effective implementation of the technology.  If a flaw is discovered, he may be able to provide a fix for the solution that can keep our migration costs minimal.

7 full-time

8-10 contractors

Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri is the concept co-creator and Chief Outreach Officer, a noted humanitarian, United Nations Women's Entrepreneurship Distinguished Fellow, Tribeca Film Festival Disruptive Innovation Award-winner, and a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University this Fall on Mobilizing Millions for Social Justice and Human Rights.

Wesley Powell is the inventor of the memory and data management solutions and our CEO.

Brian Hoffmann is former investment banker and fundraiser who is our CFO.

Jay Fossett is an internationally accomplished business strategist who is highly skilled in creating and implementing global infrastructure.

Andres Rios, our CTO, has a PhD in Information Technology and has implemented some of the largest cryptographic solutions in the world, one of which alongside Wesley Powell was for a global investment bank for over 2 years.

Scott Carlin is our VP of Ethics and ensures that we are standing for all of humanity and not just the western world point of view.

Our technology partners are IBM, Thales and Pure Storage. We are in conversations to partner with a UK COVID-19 testing company and a Uganda hospital owner.  

We are a software as a service solution and we provide value to our customers by tracking their employees COVID-19 status.  A single shutdown at a factory due to a COVID-19 infection can result in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars of production.  Our cost is only 50 per month per employee at that factory - a nearly meaningless cost compared to the risk of a shutdown even with a few thousand workers at the factory.

We are raising 1 million dollars to implement the MVP of our solution at the first few clients which will generate about 1.5M in recurring annual revenue.  We will then embark on a larger raise of 10M which will allow us to expand globally.

Solvers are connected to the most influential people and teams in the world and we look forward to working with them and expanding our ability to execute our vision through the Solver network.

Since COVID is such a political issue, we are looking for support and mentoring from the Solver team about how to be effective in executing our mission in the face of global confusion around the pandemic.

While we don't have specific names in mind, we are looking for support in how to speak with large global enterprises and national governments the world over.

Our solution protects vulnerable populations from exposure to COVID-19 and has the potential to stop the spread of this deadly virus.

Our solution will impact the entire globe within 5 years.

Our solution will impact the entire globe within 5 years.