Forgery Protection of Academic Certificates through Integrity Preservation at Scale using Ethereum Smart Contract

Abstract

Academic credentials are precious assets as they form an evidence for one’s identity and eligibility. Fraud in issuance and verification of academic certificates have been a long-standing issue in academic community. Due to lack of antiforgery mechanisms there has been substantial increase in fraudulent certificates. The need of the hour is to have a transparent and reliable model for issuing and verifying academic certificates to eliminate fraud in the process. Decentralized, Auditable and Tamper-proof properties of Blockchain makes it possibly the best choice for issuing and verifying academic certificates. In this paper we propose a model, where regulatory body authorizes higher education Institutes (universities and colleges) for issuing academic certificates to students in a decentralized way. Anyone in the world can verify the authenticity of the certificate by triggering appropriate smart contract functions, thus eliminating any possibility of fraud in the process. In addition we used multi signature scheme where certificates are required to be signed by designated authority from Higher Education Institutes, thus allowing for multi-level checks on certificate contents before being successfully deployed on Blockchain. We have also provide Proof of Concept in Ethereum Blockchain and evaluated its performance in terms of cost, security and scalability.