The EU Digital COVID Certificate (EUDCC), known in Italy as the Green Pass, and in France as the Sanitary Pass or Health Pass (''passe sanitaire''), was a

COVID-19 vaccine passport A vaccine passport or proof of vaccination is an immunity passport employed as a credential in countries and jurisdictions as part of efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic via vaccination. A vaccine passport is typically issued by a governm ...

created by the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...

(EU), that is valid in all member states. The EUDCC can be used when travelling within the Schengen Area. It launched in July 2021, and is/was applicable for citizens of the EU, and also for travellers from outside of the region. In October 2021, Johannes Bahrke, the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...

's digital spokesman, said the EUDCC "set a global standard by being the only system currently in operation internationally". Since the July 2021 launch more than 591 million certificates had been issued, 438 million of them on the basis of vaccination. In the spring of 2022, the majority of member states removed the requirement to show Covid-related documents, including the cert, for people travelling from another part of the EU or Schengen Area. Several of the remaining countries ended their use of the Covid Cert in the following months, while many abolished requirements relating to travel from outside the EU and Schengen Area. On 11 October 2022 Janine Small,

Pfizer Pfizer Inc. ( ) is an American multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation headquartered on 42nd Street in Manhattan, New York City. The company was established in 1849 in New York by two German entrepreneurs, Charles Pfizer ...

's president of international developed markets, admitted before the

European Parliament The European Parliament (EP) is one of the legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it adopts ...

Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

that, during the development of the vaccine, no transmission tests were carried out before it was placed on the market. The MEP who asked the question, Robert Roos, later stated on his

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

account that "the legal basis of the green pass has been broken down

y these statements Y, or y, is the twenty-fifth and penultimate Letter (alphabet), letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. According to some auth ...

Information in the certificate

The EUDCC certifies that a person has either: *

COVID-19 vaccination A COVID19 vaccine is a vaccine intended to provide acquired immunity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID19). Prior to the COVID19 pandemic, an est ...

* received a negative

COVID-19 test COVID-19 testing involves analyzing samples to assess the current or past presence of SARS-CoV-2. The two main types of tests detect either the presence of the virus or antibodies produced in response to infection. Molecular tests for viral p ...

result * recovered from

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quickly ...

Additionally, the certificate contains the full name and date of birth of the certificate holder. No other personal information is included. Each certificate only certifies one claim, so for each vaccination and each test a separate certificate is required.

Implementation

The EUDCC is a

digitally-signed A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature, where the prerequisites are satisfied, gives a recipient very high confidence that the message was created b ...

document. It is usually supplied in the form of a

QR code A QR code (an initialism for quick response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that can contain information about th ...

, either contained in a PDF file, or as a printout. There are various

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...

s available to store and display the EUDCC (such as the

Corona-Warn-App Corona-Warn-App is the official and open-source COVID-19 contact tracing app used for digital contact tracing in Germany made by SAP and Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems. It had been downloaded 22.8 million times as of 19 November 2020 ...

); alternatively, the EUDCC can be presented on paper. To check the validity of the EUDCC, a special software is required which scans the QR code and verifies the digital signature, for example the mobile application ''CovPassCheck-App''. Technically, the QR code contains JSON document with the information payload. This JSON document is serialized using Concise Binary Object Representation (

CBOR Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a binary data serialization format loosely based on JSON authored by C. Bormann. Like JSON it allows the transmission of data objects that contain name–value pairs, but in a more concise manner. ...

), and digitally signed according to CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE). The resulting data is compressed with

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. zlib is also ...

and encoded into the final QR code.

Non-EU countries

References

{{Portal bar, COVID-19, EU Passports Schengen Area