Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swiss Covid Certificate – Technical documentation of the swiss Covid certificate

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 145 posts

Re: Swiss Covid Certificate – Technical documentation of the swiss Covid certificate

#13

Post by mensetmanusman »

From the G7 agenda reporting:

“ Last Friday morning, during an interview on Good Morning America, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Biden administration was taking “a very close look” at the possibility of vaccine passports for travel into and out of the United States.

However by Friday afternoon the Department of Homeland Security was clarifying Mayorkas’ statement. The DHS says there won’t be any federal vaccination database nor any mandate that requires people to get a single vaccination credential. It also said there are no plans for anything like a U.S. passport.”

The U.S. is suspicious of many types of documentation. E.g. none needed for voting in many areas, etc. The culture tends towards erring on less bureaucracy.

If more states ban covid-passports, I wonder if the EU would rather not have tourists than allow visitations.

Once there is a vaccine surplus, the vast amount of risk is on those who decide out of their own volition to not get vaccinated, at which point society can’t hold their hands anymore.

Re: Swiss Covid Certificate – Technical documentation of the swiss Covid certificate

#14

Post by thepangolino »

imrehg wrote: post #7

The inoculation certificate validity is currently 180 days since the last jab (looking at the slide deck in the repo). That seems super short. Will people really need 2 courses of jabs each year (that is 4 jabs with most current vaccines)?

They pretty much have to keep this short. Anything more permanent and you open up the risk of "alternative" databases being build by nefarious third parties.

Re: Swiss Covid Certificate – Technical documentation of the swiss Covid certificate

#15

Post by burundi_coffee »

imrehg wrote: post #7

The inoculation certificate validity is currently 180 days since the last jab (looking at the slide deck in the repo). That seems super short. Will people really need 2 courses of jabs each year (that is 4 jabs with most current vaccines)?

No. The federal council has stated in multiple press conferences that the 6 month period is solely because we only have good data about vaccine protection for this time period. Studies are still ongoing and if it turns out the vaccine protects people well after this period, it will be adjusted. The 6 monthsbare just preliminary.

Re: Swiss Covid Certificate – Technical documentation of the swiss Covid certificate

#16

Post by leipert »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #13

From the G7 agenda reporting: “ Last Friday morning, during an interview on Good Morning America, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Biden administration was taking “a very close look” at the possibility of vaccine passports for travel into and out of the United States. However by Friday afternoon the Department of Homeland Security was clarifying Mayorkas’ statement. The DHS says there won’…

Well a COVID pass would still be useful inside the EU, e.g. I can leave the yellow vaccination pass at home, can show it when coming home from outside of the EU or if I go somewhere where a negative test or vaccination is required.

Re: Swiss Covid Certificate – Technical documentation of the swiss Covid certificate

#17

Post by m_st »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #13

From the G7 agenda reporting: “ Last Friday morning, during an interview on Good Morning America, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Biden administration was taking “a very close look” at the possibility of vaccine passports for travel into and out of the United States. However by Friday afternoon the Department of Homeland Security was clarifying Mayorkas’ statement. The DHS says there won’…

We Swiss people are also quite suspicious with this kind of documentation (Google Fichenaffäre / secret files scandal for reasons). To my understanding you will get this Covid certificate either through vaccination, after having had Covid-19 or after a negative test. So it's not like a central vaccine database or so.

(Note that we had such a database called "Elektronischer Impfausweis" but it had to be taken down after it was found to be a mess in security)

Re: Swiss Covid Certificate – Technical documentation of the swiss Covid certificate

#18

Post by traspler »

nnx wrote: post #4

Absolutely terrible for privacy to use a client-server architecture for this. Why can't this be purely client-validated like passport chips?

It‘s as distributed & offline as can be.

You could easily print the QR code out and the validator can be offline; the validation still works fine. The validator should have to connect to the network periodically to check for revocations, otherwise everything can be done offline.

Issuance, Revocations & cross country validation requires some kind of backbone but even issuers don‘t have to be centralized if you want. The only thing you need is to get an issuer cert from that central trust authority and you can start issuing passes that are valid.

Currently it still requires a government ID in addition to the pass so it‘s even more „offline“. The specs have room to enable eID solutions though but that will probably be online only as the verifiers will need to be specific for every provider.

Re: Swiss Covid Certificate – Technical documentation of the swiss Covid certificate

#19

Post by StavrosK »

zuas wrote: post #3
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #2

Seems complex for something that probably never going to see any real use.

It's supposed to go live next Monday / by the end of the month. We'll see. Let's just say im very skeptical when it comes to IT-projects of the Swiss government. They regularly waste 100s of millions of CHF on stuff that simply doesn't work. https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releas...

It's already live in Greece (I just issued mine). The current government has taken the national bureaucracy from the stone age to the space age in something like three years. We used to have to go to the various services' offices to get whatever certificates we needed, then around a decade ago another government created dedicated physical services for certificates, validation and other such daily work.

This government has created a website where all certificate issuance and most other government-related business is fully electronic, I kind of can't believe they've done such a good job for such a backwards country. I'm amazed.

Post reply on HN