In Germany, a digital corona vaccination certificate or proof of immunity is to be introduced. A consortium consisting of four companies received the contract for the development. The budget for this is up to three million euros. Much has been discussed and rescheduled since the contract was awarded. An overview.
What should the digital vaccination certificate be able to do?
When should the vaccination certificate be available?
How is the digital vaccination certificate supposed to work technically?
How forgery-proof is the vaccination card?
What is the difference between the German and the EU vaccination card?
What should the digital vaccination certificate be able to do?
The proof of vaccination should above all show that a person has been vaccinated in a comprehensible manner and be forgery-proof. Those who have recovered from Covid-19 disease should also be able to identify themselves with this proof, which is why it is also referred to as proof of immunity.
In contrast to the analogue yellow vaccination card or vaccination book, the planned digital vaccination certificate serves exclusively to prove the corona vaccination or the disease that has been overcome. In the vaccination book, on the other hand, all vaccinations of a person are listed. From 2022, the digital vaccination certificate, which is now being developed, is to be included in the digital vaccination card or electronic health record as part of the further development of the electronic health card, according to the Federal Ministry of Health.
(picture alliance/ Flashpic/ Jens Krick)Corona immunity card - more freedom for vaccinated and recovered people Contact restrictions, curfews and strict quarantine rules: These measures to contain the corona pandemic no longer apply to vaccinated and recovered people since the second weekend in May. An overview.
When should the corona immunity certificate be available?
According to the current status, the digital proof should be ready to go in Germany at the beginning of the second half of 2021. The so-called green certificate planned at EU level is also planned for the summer. Both should be compatible with each other.
The Chaos Computer Club (CCC), however, has expressed doubts about the timeline for proof of immunity. He will not be available in time for the summer, said CCC spokesman Matthias Marx on Dlf. "The technology is not yet in place, and then tens of thousands of medical practices and hundreds of vaccination centers will have to be connected," says Marx. The digital solution may not be ready until everyone who wants it has been vaccinated. Then the question arises whether the system is still necessary.
The digital policy spokesman for the CDU Tankred Schipanski, on the other hand, is confident that data transmission will work well. "It's always choppy at the beginning, but it's 2021 - it's to be expected that a doctor's office will have the appropriate IT," he said on Dlf. The technical challenges are easy to master - he is rather curious to see how the political questions will be solved at EU level.
(Britta Pedersen/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa) Tankred Schipanski on the vaccination certificate: "We are on the right track" The digital policy spokesman for the CDU is optimistic that there will soon be a digital green vaccination certificate. He also has no concerns about safety.
How is the digital proof of immunity supposed to work technically?
The proof of vaccination should be technically based on a so-called public key infrastructure, PKI for short. The initially planned use of blockchain technology was rejected again.
With the PKI, the data of the vaccinated person is encrypted as a data record and signed with a secret key. The data includes information about the location of the vaccination and the vaccine used. The data record should then be displayed as a "digital green certificate" via an additional module in the Corona-Warn-App and in other applications. With the associated public key, which can be distributed unprotected, the data record can be checked, for example at a border crossing, when shopping or at the theater box office. The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) had demanded free testability. According to the plans, the test should generally be able to be carried out offline. In addition, there should also continue to be the analogue vaccination certificate on paper, for example for those who do not have a smartphone.
CCC spokesman Matthias Marx considers the conventional paper evidence to be sufficient anyway. Those who checked the evidence might not have the greatest interest in a particularly thorough examination anyway, he said in the Dlf. The digital variant has no added value compared to analogue vaccination certificates, but has various disadvantages. For example, movement and contact profiles of vaccinated people could potentially be created via central systems.
(imago / Future Image)Corona vaccines at a glanceThe EU authority EMA has approved four corona vaccines so far - from Biontech/Pfizer, Moderna, Astrazeneca and Johnson & Johnson. How the vaccines work, what is known about side effects and which vaccine candidates are still available - an overview.
Marx therefore also calls for a decentralized IT architecture to make it more difficult to create movement profiles or logs of visits. This requirement is to be met with the digital vaccination card. A statement from the Bundestag's "Digital Agenda" committee states that the solution is based on an open-source approach and that no database with personal data is being created.
Anke Domscheit-Berg, spokeswoman for internet policy for the parliamentary group Die Linke, was satisfied with this: "So we will only have this digital vaccination certificate on our own mobile phones and there will be no large database, neither European nor national Level where all of our evidence is piled up. So that won't happen."
Politician Domscheit-Berg and Computer Club spokesman Matthias Marx warned against believing "that any app will get us out of the pandemic." Digital solutions could make small contributions, and that also applies to the "currently highly hyped Luca app," says Marx. However, it should not distract from the fact that major measures are needed to combat the pandemic. It is not the vaccination pass that helps us back to normal life, but the vaccination, emphasized Marx.
(picture alliance/dpa/Bernd Wüstneck)What can the "Luca app" do? In contrast to the Corona warning app, the "Luca app" not only records whether you have had contact with a person who has tested positive for Corona, but also where the contact took place. This also places higher demands on data protection.
How forgery-proof is the digital vaccination card?
There is a risk that digital vaccination certificates will be falsified because the certificate infrastructure is vulnerable. For example, the secret key, which must be strictly protected and is used to certify the vaccination certificate, can be stolen and fall into the wrong hands or even be hacked. Here, experts point out that especially in the doctor's surgeries, the security of the IT infrastructure is sometimes appallingly low.
Compared to analogue vaccination certificates, of which a few dozen would be forged, for example with stolen stickers from vaccination batches, it is possible to use the stolen keys to generate thousands of fake digital certificates in a very short time. With the PKI-based solution, however, the keys can be revoked – a major advantage because certified evidence becomes invalid when the public keys are updated.
The Chaos Computer Club also points out that various solo efforts by individual federal states to make the vaccination status verifiable via a central website have not proven to be forgery-proof. In Thuringia, for example, vaccinees could download a vaccination certificate with a QR code that directs you to such a website. "You can trick this system by creating your own certificate with your own QR code, which leads to your own fake test website that looks exactly like the official one," explained CCC spokesman Matthias Marx on DLF. Such a fake website is not a big hurdle for people who "know a bit about IT". According to Marx, the examiners would probably not notice the difference.
What is the difference between the German and the EU vaccination card?
The planned EU vaccination pass, the so-called "green certificate", and the German solution differ from each other. Among other things, the "green certificate" is intended to indicate whether someone is fully vaccinated against the corona virus and with which active substance they were vaccinated. It should be able to provide information about whether someone has tested negative or has already survived a Covid 19 disease. This information should be able to be called up in a forgery-proof manner via a barcode. The document should be issued in the respective national language and in English.
The German digital vaccination certificate is based on the concept of the European approach. The German solution will be compatible and interoperable with the European one. The certificates can also be checked in neighboring European countries and vice versa.
Overview of the coronavirus (imago / Rob Engelaar / Hollandse Hoogte)
(Source: Jan Rähm, Matthias Marx in conversation with Arndt Reuning)
