April 7-10, 2025 | Toronto, Canada

Privacy-Friendly QR Codes for Identity (G12a)

14 Sep 2022
13:45

Privacy-Friendly QR Codes for Identity (G12a)

Presenting personal information in the form of a QR code has become a daily reality for many during the Covid pandemic. In many jurisdictions across the globe, people showed their immunization information using a SMART Health Card (SHC) credential, a medical standard that gained rapid adoption. The paradigm of presenting information about oneself can easily be generalized beyond this health scenario.
This talk will first give an overview of the SHC framework, focusing on its security features and describing its deployment in the United States and Canada. The speaker will then present a generic framework to issue Claim QR codes that can encode attributes of any type. They will introduce a strong privacy feature allowing users to only disclose a subset of the encoded attributes, addressing one of the main privacy critiques of SHCs. Finally, they will give a demonstration and describe the open-source specification and reference implementation for this generic framework. https://github.com/microsoft/claimqr