New Zealand - W3C VC/DID based Vaccine Pass, Verifiers ...

Congratulations to the Ministry of Health New Zealand on choosing  W3C Verifiable Credentials and W3C Decentralized Identifiers as the basis of their roll out of the "NZ COVID Pass":

The New Zealand COVID Pass is a cryptographically signed document which can be represented in the form of a QR Code that enables an individual to express proof of having met certain health policy requirements in regards to COVID-19 such as being vaccinated against the virus.

The QR code is assembled using existing open specifications.


*         Underlying data model based on W3C Verifiable Credentials

*         Each pass has an expiry date (exp) and not before date (nbf)

*         Issuer uses DID:WEB identifiers to resolve the public key used to verify the pass digital signature.

*         CBOR Web Token (CWT) is the cryptographic structure used to represent claims in the pass, which uses Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) and CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE). CWT is derived from JSON Web Token (JWTs), but is more compact.

*         ECDSA with P-256 for the digital signature algorithm

*         Base32 encoding of CWT into QR code in Alphanumeric mode, using a prefix of NZCP:/ and a version number. Some manipulation of the Base32 may be required when decoding.


Press release @ https://www.health.govt.nz/news-media/media-releases/technical-information-published-support-covid-19-vaccine-pass-and-verifiers
Technical Specification @ https://nzcp.covid19.health.nz/
Documentation @ https://github.com/minhealthnz/nzcovidpass-spec

I am always happy when a fellow public service entity make a conscious choice to support openly developed, global, royalty free and free to use standards and specifications in their technical implementations to ensure equity, access and global interoperability!

Oh ... In case you miss it, they are deploying DID:WEB in production! Way to go!

Needless to say - Congratulations also to the entire MATTR team << Read the NZ Gov press release : -)

Best Regards,

Anil

Anil John
Technical Director, Silicon Valley Innovation Program
Science and Technology Directorate
US Department of Homeland Security
Washington, DC, USA

Email Response Time - 24 Hours

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