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Utilizing zero-knowledge proofs and cryptography so things can be proven without sharing of the underlying data needed for traditional validation. There has be
by 3np 5y ago
Utilizing zero-knowledge proofs and cryptography so things can be proven without sharing of the underlying data needed for traditional validation.
There has been a lot of progress both in fundamentals and implementations on this front over recent years but even decades old schemes using attestations would have been a huge improvement over “dump and read data through trusted server”.
Here’s a trivial one that anyone could implement without using anything new from the past decade: Whoever stands as “trusted party” could have signing certificates distributed to the verifier-side of the app. They sign hashes of the relevant info. All data sharing needed is once per issuance of “vaccination certificate”. No persistence of PII necessary. If you don’t want to have to disclose PII as part of validation, that’s where the fancier schemes come in.
If you can’t or won’t spend resources to do it properly then yes, physical card is preferred.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y agoThis is exactly what Europe does. In a sane world, every country would just adopt the same QR-code standard.
- 3np 5y agoIt’s still not great from a privacy perspective. Date of birth, names, and granular details on vaccinations are cleartext, among other things. It’s not that terrible compared to what’s out there and falls in the “trivial” category (which is not necessarily a negative; less complexity is good) but it’s far from ideal and it’d have to improve before pushing it globally.
- melolife 5y agoThe challenge is that the validator sets the rules for who is vaccinated. As an example, some jurisdictions might declare individuals with single doses protected. Another real example: the EU is unwilling to accept Covishield vaccinations, despite it being AstraZeneca/Vaxzevria manufactured in India.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y agoThe whole point of a vaccine passport is to expose information about your vaccination status to third parties. I don't see this as any different than carrying around any other ID in my wallet. My driver's license also has my name and date of birth (plus information about my eyesight and home address). The nice thing about the vaccination passport is that it is like a card in your wallet. There's no centralized server that's being queried. It's offline and distributed.