Scottish QR Code Vaccination Status and EU Green Pass

Well, there’s a QR code doing the rounds that has the potential to open up our world of travel in a more trusted way. This is the green pass, and which has been adopted in Scotland. The morals and ethics of this can be debated endlessly, but from a cryptography point-of-view, it is great to see a start towards building more trustworthy digital ways in allowing people to travel. A great thing is that it looks like the NHS have adopted the EU Green Pass format for vaccine status data.

First, we start with the basic data for the vaccine status report:

{
  "1": "GB",
  "4": 1992212161,
  "6": 1425632973,
  "-260": {
    "1": {
      "v": [
        {
          "ci": "URN:UVCI:01:GB:D23AD1B216A11133B272BEA32C426AC0#D",
          "co": "GB",
          "dn": 1,
          "dt": "2021-01-14",
          "is": "NHS Anywhere",
          "ma": "ORG-110302699",
          "mp": "EU/1/21/1529",
          "sd": 2,
          "tg": "341534114",
          "vp": "3339315014"
        }
      ],
      "dob": "1977-01-10",
      "nam": {
        "fn": "SMITH",
        "gn": "FRED SMITH",
        "fnt": "SMITH",
        "gnt": "FRED<SMITH"
      },
      "ver": "1.3.0"
    }
  }

This contains the date of birth of the person, their name, and the details of their vaccination. To then encode this into the QR, we create a signed…