Abstract
Academic degrees are subject to corruptions, system flaws, forgeries, and imitations. In this paper we propose to develop a blockchain smart contract-based application using Ethereum Platform, to store, distribute and verify academic certificates. It constitutes a trusted, decentralized certificate’s management system that can offer a unified viewpoint for students, academic institutions, as well as for other potential stakeholders such as employers. The article describes the implementation of three main parts of our proposed solution that includes: verification application, university interface and accreditor interface. This application avoids administrative barriers, makes the process of deployment, verification, and validation of certificates faster, efficient, and more secure. Additionally, it offers confidentiality of the data by using AES encryption algorithm before creating transactions and allows bulk submission of multiple academic certificates.
Highlights
Existing verification methods of academic degrees have some limitations relating to dependencies on third parties, being time consuming, ownership rights, availability, and costs [1, 2]
The purpose of this study is to prove the feasibility of using Ethereum Blockchain [8,9] based smart contract [10, 11] to upload an academic certificate to a distributed ledger, verify it and make it accessible to a third party via ‘smart contract’ permissions
The purpose of application: (1) This application should be able to connect to a series of peer-topeer networks such as Ethereum, IPFS and other systems depending on future technology adoption; (2) It should be user friendly and should be supported by a wide range of devices as they will be used by users to access the data; (3) On the other hand this application will be used by institutions to assist in the development of the project and in the deployment of certificates; (4) Gather informative and usage data
Summary
Existing verification methods of academic degrees have some limitations relating to dependencies on third parties, being time consuming, ownership rights, availability, and costs [1, 2]. A smart contract is a computer program intended to automatically execute specific actions based on set terms [12] This will allow to define the structure of the certificates, and the identification of entity that can deploy, edit, and validate them. The architecture of the proposed application and implementation details (Leka, 2020) are presented at our previous research article It describes the proposed system, called BCert [15], which. Depending on how universities and accreditation bodies work together, a certificate can be verified later, or upon its insertion into the blockchain. Those applications connect to the same network and contract, sharing and accessing the same information and certificates.
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