Can the US crack down on fake vaccination cards? | Hacker News Reader

Can the US crack down on fake vaccination cards?

bbc.com

The best solution is to not mandate them IMO. If you create strong incentives for fraud with something that’s difficult to authenticate then you shouldn’t be surprised when it happens a lot.

It could have been done more securely, even on paper.

The standard EU Covid passport is a QR code that contains all the data cryptographically signed, which is much more difficult to fake that a card filled by hand...

So do you have to provide a second piece of ID with it then?

(What's preventing one person from copying their cryptographically signed card?)

Yes, obviously the person needs to show some sort of ID as well. Quite a few EU countries have ID cards, but I suppose a driving licence would do as well.

The card includes the holder's name and DOB, I believe, so along with showing ID this makes copying a card useless.

The only alternative I can think of (assuming we do want secure Covid 'passport') is to have a picture taken when you get your jab and include that picture in a secure card... That's probably more difficult to implement when the vast majority of people have a photographic ID (ID card or driving licence, or even passport which is a very common document to have in Europe).

It's hard to "crack down" on something that you could basically print at home and fill out yourself. That is unless something is developed to link the vaccination to your identity record. I've heard that there is work going on to associate a unique UPC code do each dose and then you could scan/attach it to a data record that could be verified either on your phone or in the cloud.

How would that work for the billions of people who have already received vaccines without the unique UPC code, though?

From the way all of the current vaccine passports "work", I would guess not.

Who could have thought that the government trying to roll out an app/service to millions of users overnight would be flawed? /s

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