Proof of Vaccination Technology and Standards

The talk opens with the case for digital proof of vaccination credentials, needed once businesses, venues and governments began asking people to show they were immunized. The speaker frames the goals as revealing only what a verifier needs, working across jurisdictions, and letting holders present the credential without any remote database lookup.

The core design pairs a human-readable page with a machine-readable QR code that carries a compact signed payload, following the SMART Health Card format used in Canada and many US providers. The payload holds a name, birth date, vaccine details and validity. The issuer's public key is published at a known web location instead of being embedded, because a forger could otherwise slip in their own key. Verifier apps cache issuer keys and per-jurisdiction policy files so they can check signatures offline. A live demonstration showed a genuine code passing and an altered one failing. Revocation lists cover compromised keys or bad vaccine lots, and the talk noted the lack of federal coordination in the US compared with Canada's shared issuer list.

The closing argument was that blockchain was unnecessary: signed documents, public key cryptography, minimal data and cached trust lists met the requirements, including offline use. The main risks sit in a few well-protected points, such as issuer lists and signing keys. Questions covered key rotation, certificate expiry, malicious issuers and extending the standard to other vaccines.