Analysis of the EU Digital COVID Certificate system and proposal of design improvements

Abstract

In early 2021, the European Commission defined a system to manage the issuance and the verification of the Digital COVID Certificates (DCC) and to offer interoperability of said certificates throughout the distinct national issuers and verifiers of every European State. This thesis presents a work of analysis of the European DCC architecture, focusing on security and usability aspects. The analysis mostly produced ideas for the improvement of the usability of the 2D code used to verify the user's certificate, by redefining some guidelines concerning the data structures adopted for the data encoding, resulting in a better space complexity. An infrastructure mimicking the original European one has been developed to show how the aforementioned improvements could be implemented.