Secure Management of Digital Academic Certificates Using Blockchain Technology

The education sector is striving/needed to bring innovation in its different activities and the blockchain technology (BT), which is proposed for Bitcoin cryptocurrency, has promising property in securely decentralizing many applications including the ledger for banking systems. In this paper, we employ blockchain in academics for secure storage and easy retrieval/online verification of the hard-earned certificates to be used in diverse areas namely jobs, higher educations, forgery-detection, etc. Note that the academic certificates are indispensable for everyone’s lives, and it is the time to keep such important property in non-destructible manner but with easy accessibility to all concerned. The basic idea is that an educational institution while publishing the results of examinations, in addition to the distribution of certificates/marksheets to the students must incorporate the same in blockchain as smart certificates and make them available in peer-to-peer (P2P) network. This avoids the maintenance of registers for results kept by colleges, universities, education sectors, etc.; however, it supports for proofs of degrees claimed by students and online quick verification for any issue including fake certificate submission. An institution based on the departments, disciplines and various programs run creates multiple blockchains corresponding to the registers maintained, though the first block called the genesis block contained institute’s identity, would be the common for all. For conceptualization, a prototype design for management of blockchain-based smart certificates with various uses is presented.