I am in no way associated with the province of British Columbia, except for the fact that I happen to live here. I am simply a software engineer scratching a curiosity itch.
British Columbia Vaccine passports display a QR code. If you are curious, and use an off-the-shelf QR code reader on your celphone (such as Google Lens) to look into the text that it encodes, you will just see a long series of numbers that look something like this:
shc:/5762958976377857575700784227.....
This project simply deciphers these numbers back into a human-readable form so that the average person with some computer knowledge can be informed on what information is being revealed whenever they present their BC Vaccine Card.
This project is implemented in the Python Programming Language and works entirely from the command prompt. There is no fancy GUI.
- Install Python >= 3.9
- Fetch contents of this project. From the command prompt:
git initgit pull https://github.com/jhaslam/bc_vaccine_card_decoder.git
- Fetch this project's dependency closure. From the command prompt:
python -m venv venvsource ./project_env/Scripts/activatepython -m pip install -r requirements.txt
- From this project's directory, run:
python -m shc_decode - Paste the encoded QR code
sch:\57629...numbers provided by your off-the-shelf QR-Code reader into the prompt.
A bit of digging reveals that British Columbia is using the "Smart Health Cards" framework, which encodes this data using "Compact Serialization JSON Web Signatures (JWS)". The data is signed but not encrypted so if we want to look, we just need to decode according to published spec.
https://spec.smarthealth.cards/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7515