EU Digital COVID Certificate - P051292-978859

The EU Digital COVID Certificate (EUDCC), best known in Italy as the Green Pass and in France as the Sanitary Pass or Health Pass (''passe sanitaire''), was a digital certificate that a person has been vaccinated against

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In January 2020, the disease spread worldwide, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic. The symptoms of COVID‑19 can vary but often include fever ...

, tested for infection with

SARS-CoV-2 Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the respiratory illness responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus previously had the Novel coronavirus, provisional nam ...

, or recovered from COVID-19 created by the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

(EU) and valid in all

member states A member state is a state that is a member of an international organization or of a federation or confederation. Since the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) include some members that are not sovereign states ...

. The EU Digital COVID Certificate was created to facilitate travel within the European Union. It launched in July 2021, and is available to citizens of the EU, and also to travellers from outside of the region. By December 2022, the member states had issued more than 2 billion EU Digital COVID Certificates. With 51 non-EU countries and territories connected to the system in addition to the 27 member states, the EU Digital COVID Certificate is a global standard for COVID-19 certification. While in March 2022, 17 member states were still requiring travellers to be in the possession of an EU Digital COVID Certificate, this number dropped to 7 member states in May 2022, and eventually to 0 member states in August 2022. The EU Digital COVID Certificate system expired on 30 June 2023.

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). Knowledge about the structure and func ...

* received a negative COVID-19 test result * recovered from

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 was a digitally-signed document. It was usually supplied in the form of a QR code, either contained in a

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

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 smartphone, phone, tablet computer, tablet, or smartwatch, watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop appli ...

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

Corona-Warn-App Corona-Warn-App was 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 a ...

); alternatively, the EUDCC can be presented on paper. To check the validity of the EUDCC, special software was required which scans the QR code and verifies the digital signature, for example the mobile application ''CovPassCheck-App''. Technically, the QR code contains a

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consi ...

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 Carsten Bormann and Paul Hoffman. Like JSON it allows the transmission of data objects that contain attribute–value pair, name ...

), 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 as well as a data format. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compre ...

and encoded into the final QR code.

Non-EU countries

References

{{Authority control European Union health policy Passports Schengen Area Medical records Software associated with the COVID-19 pandemic