Trustworthy Verification of Academic Credentials through Blockchain Technology

Academic credentials are representative evidence for knowledge or skills gained over a stipulated period of time by individuals. These credentials are expected to carry unique features that identify a particular individual. They should be managed and processed in such a way that they are secure and tampered proof. Traditional methods of credential management are characterized by inefficiency and vulnerability to fraud, forgery and manipulation. They also depend on intermediary centralized authorities which create bottle neck in the verification of credentials. Decentralized technologies such as blockchain and self-sovereign identity offer transformative alternatives to management and processing of academic credentials that could overcome the challenges with traditional methods. This paper presents a comprehensive review on the challenges in the traditional system of education, focusing on academic credential management and the use of decentralized technology for credential management. In this regard, existing literature that relates to three important issues (efficiency, transparency and security of data) in academic credential management is reviewed. Several studies on academic credential management that are based on blockchain technology have been reviewed and analyzed. More specifically, a comparative analysis of different credential management models in terms of efficiency, security and transparency is conducted. Based on the findings from this survey, a decentralized, efficient, transparent, immutable and secure solution for academic credential management in HEIs is possible. This survey contributes to the growing body of knowledge and can form a foundation for this important area of research. The identified research gaps are discussed, and recommendations are made as guide to future research direction in the adoption and implementation of decentralized credential management system in HEIs.

The difficulties with existing certificate verification systems are often expensive, time-consuming, and vulnerable to fraud addressed in this study. The professional and academic credentials are significant proof of a person’s qualifications, but its centralized design of existing systems enables the data manipulation feasible and affects the security. The proposed method producing and ensuring the digital academic credentials utilizes the permissioned Ethereum blockchain platform to provide a decentralized, secured, and impenetrable system. Blockchain technology ensures certificate integrity and authenticity by eliminating a central authority. Employers and stakeholders can securely evaluate university credentials through a decentralized web application. This system eliminates verification delays and fraud, making certificate management more effective and efficient. Additionally, other certificate types include a pertaining to ownership or identity that added to the system. Overall, the proposed blockchain-based method improves the speed and dependability of credential verification procedures by offers a scalable and safe substitute for conventional certificate verification methods.

Blockchain technology has emerged as a powerful tool for enhancing transparency, security, efficiency, and inclusivity in record-keeping, credentialing, and educational transactions in the digital age. This paper aims to highlight the potential benefits and challenges of integrating blockchain technology into educational environments, emphasizing security, transparency, and credential verification as key areas of focus. Blockchain technology offers transformative potential in the field of education, particularly in credential and certification processes, providing secure, transparent, and globally accessible solutions for verifying academic achievements and professional skills. As blockchain technology continues to evolve, further advancements and case studies specific to enhancing privacy in educational processes are expected to emerge, addressing the unique challenges and regulatory requirements associated with handling sensitive educational data. Further R&D in blockchain technology within the education sector holds promise for addressing existing challenges, unlocking new opportunities, and advancing the capabilities of educational institutions worldwide.

Ubiquitous availability of Internet connectivity IoT enabled medical devices and advances in electronic health records have given rise to massive amounts of personal health data. However, being sensitive in nature, there are stringent legal requirements related to the sharing and processing of personal health data. There is a growing trend of using Personal Information Management System (PIMS) to gather, store, manage, and provide secure and privacy-aware access to personal data. Recently, blockchain technology has emerged as a lucrative option for personal health information management. In this chapter, we propose a layered architecture for a blockchain-based PIMS for managing data originating from medical IoT devices. The proposed architecture has four layers as follows: (1) A blockchain layer that provides functionality to implement and host blockchain database; (2) An IoT device layer that consists of electronic data devices such as health watch, weighing scale, and blood pressure measurement sensors; (3) An application layer that collects data from the health devices and displays consolidated data view to the user; and (4) An adapter layer that has a responsibility of interfacing an application layer with the blockchain layer. The proposed architecture is extensible to accommodate additional electronic devices and services and it is also language and platform agnostic. We are currently building a Proof of Concept (PoC) prototype for validating proposed architecture using Hyperledger Fabric platform.KeywordsBlockchain technologyHyperledger fabricPersonal information management systemsIoT integrationAdapter design pattern

Blockchain technology has gained significant attention in recent years due to its potential to revolutionize various industries. In the educational domain, a blockchain-based framework has emerged as a promising solution with several benefits. This paper explores the concept of a blockchain-based framework for the educational domain and highlights its benefits. The framework focuses on areas such as credential verification, academic records and transcripts, anti-fraud measures, micro-credentialing, secure assessments, and efficient data sharing. By leveraging blockchain technology, educational institutions can enhance transparency, security, and efficiency in these areas. Credential verification becomes more reliable and tamper-proof as digital credentials are stored on the blockchain. Academic records and transcripts can be securely shared between institutions, simplifying the transfer process and reducing administrative burdens. Blockchain's immutability and cryptographic security features help combat issues like fake degrees or certificates, ensuring the authenticity of educational qualifications. The framework also enables the issuance and management of micro-credentials, reflecting specific skills or knowledge. By recording these credentials on the blockchain, individuals can have a comprehensive and verifiable record of their lifelong learning achievements. In the assessment process, blockchain technology enhances security and integrity by preventing data manipulation or cheating. The framework provides a decentralized and transparent platform for storing question banks, exam results, and assessments. Furthermore, blockchain-based frameworks facilitate secure and efficient sharing of educational resources, research findings, and collaborations. Smart contracts automate processes such as copyright permissions, royalty distributions, and collaborative project agreements, ensuring transparency and fairness. While the benefits of a blockchain-based framework in education are promising, challenges regarding technical implementation, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and privacy must be addressed. Further research and development are needed to explore these aspects and enable widespread adoption of blockchain solutions in the educational domain

Purpose: With application of general strain theory, this study investigates how internal audit function and blockchain technology can be leveraged to ensure the sustainability of higher education institutions (HEIs) by combating faculty credential fraud. Faculty members with fake credentials pose a significant threat, jeopardizing the quality of education, eroding public trust, and hindering the institution's ability to attract qualified students and faculty. Methodology: A comprehensive review of existing literature and reports related to faculty credential fraud, internal audit practices, and blockchain technology is conducted. The study considers the effectiveness of internal audit and blockchain solutions in addressing faculty credential fraud within the context of HEI sustainability. Study also provides practical solutions for the development and implementation of blockchain specifically related to HEIs and defines specific measures to be taken by internal audit function towards preventing such frauds. Findings: The study reveals that faculty credential fraud poses a significant threat to the sustainability of HEIs. When faculty lack the qualifications they claim, it undermines the quality of education students receive. This can lead to a decline in student enrollment, reputational damage, and difficulty attracting qualified students and faculty, ultimately jeopardizing the institution's long-term viability. Internal audit plays a crucial role in identifying and preventing fraudulent credential use. Blockchain technology, on the other hand, offers a secure and transparent platform for verifying faculty credentials, combating document forgery, and ensuring the qualifications of teaching and research staff. Novelty: This study offers a unique perspective by integrating internal audit and blockchain technology as a comprehensive solution to address faculty credential fraud. By implementing these tools, HEIs can significantly enhance faculty credential verification processes, improve data security, and uphold the trust and credibility of their academic staff. Practical Implications: This research suggests practical measures for HEIs. These include adopting proactive measures like enhanced credential verification procedures, data analytics for identifying inconsistencies, employee education on ethical practices, and implementing blockchain-based credential verification systems. These measures collectively contribute to a more sustainable educational environment with qualified faculty delivering quality education.

With the continuous progress of blockchain technology, how to use it for commodity traceability has become a concern. This study mainly discusses the Internet of Things supervision system and supply chain financial supervision method based on blockchain technology. The whole blockchain network is a decentralized system, which consists of six layers: data layer, network layer, and consensus layer. These three layers are the foundation layer; the other three layers are incentive layer, contract layer, and application layer. The interface of the platform needs to be conceived in combination with the business of building materials. According to the functional differentiation, the required interfaces mainly include information generation interface, information verification, information retrieval, and other information interfaces. Smart contracts can process data, operate asset transactions, manage smart assets, and expand the ability of blockchain to use data. In this way, the blockchain technology can trace the source of the data, so as to ensure the authenticity and security of the data. Blockchain technology can be used in data tracking. Specifically, in the building materials industry, with the help of blockchain technology, building material mixing enterprises can see the raw materials such as sand and gravel purchased under the order, the region where they are produced, the time point of transportation, the carrier, etc. In the process of supply chain financial supervision experiment, when the pledge rate of building materials is within the range of [0.4206,1], the bank income under the block chain mode is higher. The system designed in this study realizes the certification and traceability of building materials and has good use value.

N-tier application design has become very common in the IT industry. Each individual layer, such as the application and data layer has its own main functionality. This design is very helpful in securing the application from unauthorized access and in protecting it from attacks to the data layer. The data layer is the core of a company's business, as all the important information of the company will be stored in the data layer and normally will be located in a secured off- line server with limited local network access. The application layer acts as the medium to exchange data between the client layer and the data layer over a network. As such, the application layer has been increasingly targeted for intrusion and attacks. This paper will introduce a method to minimize the security risks in the n-tier application design. The method introduced in this paper will mainly focus on how to secure the application layer from various attacks such as Denial of Services (DoS) attack and spoofing attacks. This is achieved through data protection such as random encryption key generation, data encryption etc. and so forth at both the client application and the application layer. 

The rapid advances in Blockchain technology have impacted various areas, including financial, healthcare, and supply chain systems. Due to its unique characteristics, such as decentralization, trustworthiness, and security, this technology has recently been used in education, particularly in the verification of academic certificates. A certificate from an academic institution is a crucial document that could give someone access to new prospects. It frequently serves as a great starting point for choosing candidates during the recruitment process. Due to the lack of an effective anti-forging mechanism, academic certificates are vulnerable to fraud, forgery, and imitation. To combat this trend, educational institutions have implemented methods that often entail a third party verifying the legitimacy of academic certificates. A review of reference studies was conducted for this purpose. Many databases and papers that focused on blockchain in academic certificate verification and made important contributions rather than just making general statements about the topic were chosen. This paper investigates the benefits and challenges of blockchain technology in academic certificate verification. In the results obtained, it has been suggested that while blockchain technology in academic degree verification is still a new field, it holds a lot of promise for the academic certificate verification process as a whole. Finally, to avoid fake documents, this review paper focuses on papers related to the Academic Certificate Authenticity System (ACAS) using blockchain technology.

This chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges of applying blockchain technologies in the education sector. Current educational research focuses on using artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and other advanced technologies to help educators, educational institutions, and businesses achieve their goals by developing solutions that allow learners and educators to benefit from personalized learning at scale. Specifically, by combining blockchain technology with higher education certificates and diplomas we can make the process of verifying academic credentials more convenient and transparent. Learning records may be stored in a reliable, decentralized system using block-chain technology that can also be used to provide credible digital certificates, exchange learning resources employing digital currencies, and preserve intellectual property through encryption software. According to the findings, using blockchain technology into the development of online education is a promising trend. By permitting legally binding smart-contracts, streamlining credentialing procedures, maintaining the viability and integrity of education data, and boosting the efficacy of educational aggregates, blockchain has the potential to drastically disrupt present business models. For the labor force to be able to quickly apply freshly learned skills and competences to the actual world, credentials that are reliably easy and quick to transfer are critical. At the same time, an education governance model incentivizes education providers to improve management and sustainability.

Online ballot box system has the advantages of high efficiency and environmental protection, but the existing network voting technology still has a lot of matter. Almost all electronic voting system could be proved to be intrusion. The administrator of the system could tamper with the data for benefit, and the system may be attacked by hackers. The safety and fairness of the existing network voting system depend entirely on the safety and credibility of the website itself, but these cannot guarantee the fairness of voting. Make full use of blockchain technology, so that voting, even if there are malicious participants, but also to ensure the correctness and safety of the vote. The introduction of block chain technology, block chain has decentralized, data tampering and other characteristics. P2P network is applied in the block chain layer to construct a distributed database, digital signature algorithm and encryption technology are used to ensure that the data cannot be tampered with, consensus network algorithm is used to ensure the consistency of the data in the network, and timestamp technology is applied to save the data blocks in a chain structure connected end to end. It paper focuses on the implementation of P2P network networking mode, node block synchronization, data and block verification mechanism and consensus mechanism to ensure data consistency in the network layer of block chain layer. Using time stamp, Merkle tree, asymmetric encryption and other technologies to design data blocks and use chain structure to store data blocks. Combined with the characteristics of blockchain, a fair and transparent voting system is constructed. Model aims to apply the block chain technology to the voting scenario and design a secure block chain voting architecture. It system is designed and developed based on the block chain system. It makes full use of its decentralization, removes the dependence of electronic voting on trusted third parties, and protects the privacy of voters and candidates. Data cannot be tampered with. Once the data are stored in the block chain, it cannot be tampered with. It provides a real and credible database.

In the backdrop of the escalating incidents of mobile device theft and associated security challenges, a resilient and innovative solution is imperative. The traditional security mechanisms, largely reliant on the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI), have been fraught with vulnerabilities, leading to a surge in incidents of device theft and data breaches. Addressing this pressing issue, we present a novel, two-tiered approach integrating sensor technology and blockchain to bolster mobile device security. This work aims to create and assess a dual-layered security strategy that uses blockchain and sensor technologies in a complementary way. Based on a rigorous conceptual framework, it explores a two-tiered security model that intricately combines sensor and blockchain technologies. This collaborative integration aims to provide an effective solution to the widespread challenges of theft and security breaches in mobile devices. The methodology employs a sensor layer for real-time data collection and processing to detect potential thefts, and activating alerts. The blockchain layer, invoked upon these alerts, initiates secure, transparent, and decentralized transactions for verification and validation across network nodes. This dual mechanism ensures swift and secure anti-theft actions, supported by an enhanced encryption standard. Our result analysis reveals the proposed system’s superiority in computational time, energy consumption, and overall security levels when compared to existing protocols. The integration of real-time processing and blockchain’s immutable nature promises reduced false positives and enhanced data integrity. The findings indicate that this integrative approach not only mitigates theft but also ensures data security, marking a significant stride in mobile security technology. In conclusion, this two-layered system promises a scalable, efficient, and robust solution to mobile device theft and data breaches, with potential impacts transcending individual device security to influence broader data privacy and security paradigms, thus signifying a pivotal development in the field of mobile security.

Medical IoT devices that use miniature sensors to collect patient’s bio-signals and connected medical applications are playing a crucial role in providing pervasive and personalized healthcare. This technological improvement has also created opportunities for the better management of personal health information. The Personal Health Information Management System (PHIMS) supports activities such as acquisition, storage, organization, integration, and privacy-sensitive retrieval of consumer’s health information. For usability and wide acceptance, the PHIMS should follow the design principles that guarantee privacy-aware health information sharing, individual information control, integration of information obtained from multiple medical IoT devices, health information security, and flexibility. Recently, blockchain technology has emerged as a lucrative option for the management of personal health information. In this paper, we propose eHealthChain—a blockchain-based PHIMS for managing health data originating from medical IoT devices and connected applications. The eHealthChain architecture consists of four layers, which are a blockchain layer for hosting a blockchain database, an IoT device layer for obtaining personal health data, an application layer for facilitating health data sharing, and an adapter layer, which interfaces the blockchain layer with an application layer. Compared to existing systems, eHealthChain provides complete control to the user in terms of personal health data acquisition, sharing, and self-management. We also present a detailed implementation of a Proof of Concept (PoC) prototype of eHealthChain system built using Hyperledger Fabric platform.

DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, is based on a distributed ledger called blockchain technology. Using blockchain, DeFi may customize the execution of predetermined operations between parties. The DeFi system use blockchain technology to execute user transactions, such as lending and exchanging. The total value locked in DeFi decreased from $200 billion in April 2022 to $80 billion in July 2022, indicating that security in this area remained problematic. In this paper, we address the deficiency in DeFi security studies. To our best knowledge, our paper is the first to make a systematic analysis of DeFi security. First, we summarize the DeFi-related vulnerabilities in each blockchain layer. Additionally, application-level vulnerabilities are also analyzed. Then we classify and analyze real-world DeFi attacks based on the principles that correlate to the vulnerabilities. In addition, we collect optimization strategies from the data, network, consensus, smart contract, and application layers. And then, we describe the weaknesses and technical approaches they address. On the basis of this comprehensive analysis, we summarize several challenges and possible future directions in DeFi to offer ideas for further research.

This chapter explores how blockchain technology can revolutionize the education sector. Originally developed for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, blockchain is a system that securely stores data in a way that is transparent and nearly impossible to tamper with. The chapter explains how educational institutions can use blockchainpowered smart contracts to make administrative tasks, like student registrations, fee payments, and record-keeping, more efficient and secure. By automating these processes, institutions can save time and reduce human error. The chapter also looks into how blockchain can transform learning platforms, offering students more control and flexibility over their education. With decentralized platforms, students can access learning materials from anywhere, and their academic progress is securely recorded, giving them full ownership of their records. Another key focus of the chapter is how blockchain can improve the issuing and verification of academic certificates. The traditional methods are often slow and open to fraud, but blockchain allows for certificates to be securely stored and easily verified, ensuring their authenticity. This reduces the need for third-party verification and builds trust between educational institutions and future employers. In summary, blockchain has the potential to make education more efficient, secure, and accessible. Whether it's streamlining administrative tasks, offering new ways of learning, or ensuring the authenticity of academic credentials, blockchain could greatly improve how education systems operate and serve both students and institutions.