Less haste, more speed: Base45, zlib and Vaccine Passports

Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
6 min readSep 4, 2021

Well, we now live in a strange world. Our world has been damaged over the past 18 months, and, for the sake of our next generation, we must now rebuild our economic infrastructure, and look to rebuild our links between countries.

And so we have reached the point of rebuilding trust between the regions and nations of the world, and enabling safe travel must be a key way forward. For this, a concrete proof (eg vaccine status verification) at our borders seems to be the best way forward for the nations and regions of the world to rebuild trust. The usage of vaccine passports for events, such as football matches and concerts, is a whole other debate. At a border, you can invest in trusted systems and have a high degree of integrity, but at a football match there is a whole different level of trust and integrity required (and where paper versions of documents are likely to be preferred).

And so, yesterday, Scotland released their ‘vaccine passport’ (which I think is a terrible term) and which has an integrated QR code:

The vaccine status document can be downloaded as a PDF, and contains printed confirmation of vaccine status, and…

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Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.