covidpass

This web application offers the possibility to scan the EU-wide vaccination, test and recovery certificates (namely EU Digital COVID Certificate) as QR code and generate an Apple Wallet pass from it, so they are easily accessible for validation on iPhone, and Apple Watch.

Discussion

Since the QR codes store sensitive personal information as well as health data, processing of the data is done entirely within the users browser. Only a hash over the data is sent to the server to sign it with a certificate issued by Apple, for which a Apple Developer Program Membership is required.

Providing Apple Wallet passes from the official COVID apps, like Corona-Warn, has already been discussed and seems to have been discarded due to security concerns and lack of specification of this requirement to developers (see here or here).

While we very much understand these decisions for the official COVID apps, we believe that with proper education, users can assess these risks for themselves. As furthermore named here, there are countless apps which can be utilized to generate Apple Wallet passes. However, they also use external servers and it is intransparent how data, this case very sensitive data, is handled.

Therefore, this project offers a transparent and secure way to create passes.
If you disagree, feel free to open an issue and let’s discuss it.

Principles

This project attempts a compromise to enable the user experience of Apple Wallet passes while protecting sensitive information in the best possible way. For this it follows the following principles:

• Data economy
  • The sensitive data is only used within the users browser
  • The data itself is never transmitted or stored
  • No website analytics or ad tracking
• Transparency
  • The authors strive to be as transparent as possible
  • Within the process the user gets educated and his or her consent is required
• Open Source
  • Full source code is available
  • Code can be reviewed by third parties
  • Easy to deploy yourself (but Apple® Developer membership required)
• No commercial interests
  • Creating Apple Wallet passes is and will always be free of charge
  • Health data should never be used for profit!

Getting started

Add and convert certificate

Add your Pass Type ID certificate (with extension .cer) from the iOS Provisioning Portal to your Keychain and export as .p12 to the ./keys folder, named by your Pass ID (e.g. com.example.myNewPass.p12).

Then run the following command to convert to .pem as well as to automatically load the needed wwdr.pem certificate:

./node_modules/passbook/bin/node-passbook prepare-keys -p keys

Alternatively you can directly convert the certificates using openssl:

openssl pkcs12 -legacy -in "./keys/<PASS_ID>.p12" -out "./keys/<PASS_ID>.pem" -passout "pass:<PASS_CERT_SECRET>" -nocerts
curl https://developer.apple.com/certificationauthority/AppleWWDRCA.cer | openssl x509 -inform der -out ./keys/wwdr.pem

Check if expired with openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in ./keys/<PASS_ID>.pem.

Set environment variables

The following environment variables have to be set for Apple Wallet® pass generation. This can be done by an .env file within the project root or by adding the variables to the environment.

NODE_ENV=production
ALLOWED_ORIGINS=         # Comma separated list of origins
PASS_TYPE_IDENTIFIER=    # The Wallet Pass ID
PASS_TEAM_IDENTIFIER=    # The Developer Team identifier
PASS_CERT_SECRET=        # The .pem secret set while converting from .p12 to .pem

Development Setup

# install dependencies
$ yarn install

# serve with hot reload at localhost:3000
$ yarn dev

For detailed explanation on how things work, check out Nuxt.js docs.

For testing, the QR codes from the EU DGC test data set can be used.

Deploy with Docker Compose

# build container
$ docker-compose build  

# run container
$ docker-compose up -d  

Except when accessed from localhost, the container must be run behind a reverse proxy (e.g. nginx), which provides SSL and redirects all traffic to HTTPS!

Trademark notice

Apple, Apple Wallet, iPhone and Apple Watch are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions.