Fake Certificates Research Articles

LINKABLE RING SIGNATURES FOR BLOCKCHAIN PRIVACY PROTECTION

A numerous security vulnerabilities have emerged within the PK system. For example, a compromised CA can issue illegal or fake certificates for any domains, and a CA can issue unauthorized certificates without the consent of the domain owner. In addition, some high-value target domains, such as bank and government agencies may have been frequently attacked, and the adversaries can launch the targeted attacks by making use of the disclosure of the issuing CAs. To address these pressing issues or challenges, in this work, we propose a novel blockchain-based PKI framework using linkable ring signatures, called LRS_PKI. Specially, we propose a novel certificate issuance mechanism that utilizes linkable ring signatures to hide the issuing CA, so as to reduce the risk of the PKI system being attacked. Additionally, we introduce the blockchain as a public log to record the certificate operations, and adopt the decentralized storage IPFS to store the certificates to decouple the blockchain layer and storage layer. In order to prevent the CA from issuing unauthorized certificates, we have added a condition to verify whether the issuing CA in the certificate verification.

A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure Using the Web of Trust

Internet applications rely on Secure Socket Layer (SSL)/Transport Security Layer (TSL) certifications to establish secure communication. However, the centralized nature of certificate authorities (CAs) poses a risk, as malicious third parties could exploit the CA to issue fake certificates to malicious web servers, potentially compromising the privacy and integrity of user data. In this paper, we demonstrate how the utilization of decentralized certificate verification with blockchain technology can effectively address and mitigate such attacks. We present a decentralized public key infrastructure (PKI) based on a distributed trust model, e.g., Web of Trust (WoT) and blockchain technologies, to overcome vulnerabilities like single points of failure and to prevent tampering with existing certificates. In addition, our infrastructure establishes a trusted key-ring network that decouples the authentication process from CAs in order to enhance secure certificate issuance and accelerate the revocation process. Furthermore, as a proof of concept, we present the implementation of our proposed system in the Ethereum blockchain, confirming that the proposed framework meets the five identified requirements. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed system in practice, albeit with additional overhead compared to conventional PKIs.

A Blockchain-based Conceptual Model to Address Educational Certificate Verification Challenges in Tanzania

The proliferation of counterfeit educational certificates is an ongoing issue around the world, including Tanzania. The effect of this malpractice is detrimental to the credibility of education. Traditional strategies to prevent fake certificates are abortive, calling for a more sophisticated approach. Blockchain technology has recently emerged as an ideal solution to this problem due to its inherent attributes that ensure disintermediation, immutability, tamper proof, anonymity, transparency, consensus, security, and trust. However, most existing blockchain-based solutions lack crucial functionalities that are pertinent to the Tanzanian education system. This study unveiled the challenges faced by the current verification system in Tanzania and proposed a blockchain-based conceptual model to address them. The proposed model is based on blockchain, smart contracts, and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to investigate certification problems in Tanzania and modeling techniques were used to construct the conceptual model. The findings showed that the main challenges of the current verification system emanate from manual procedures, unverifiable credentials, susceptibility of centralized storage systems, disintegrated verification systems, revocation problems, difficulties in communication, and high dependency on the issuers. These challenges undermine certificate verification, impose a significant setback in the fight against forgeries, and create loopholes. It was conceptually demonstrated that these issues can be resolved through the proposed blockchain-based solution.

LRS_PKI: A novel blockchain-based PKI framework using linkable ring signatures

In recent years, numerous security vulnerabilities have emerged within the PKI system. For example, a compromised CA can issue illegal or fake certificates for any domains, and a CA can issue unauthorized certificates without the consent of the domain owner. In addition, some high-value target domains, such as banks and government agencies may have been frequently attacked, and the adversaries can launch the targeted attacks by making use of the disclosure of the issuing CAs. To address these pressing issues or challenges, in this work, we propose a novel blockchain-based PKI framework using linkable ring signatures, called LRS_PKI. Specially, we propose a novel certificate issuance mechanism that utilizes linkable ring signatures to hide the issuing CA, so as to reduce the risk of the PKI system being attacked. Additionally, we introduce the blockchain as a public log to record the certificate operations, and adopt the decentralized storage IPFS to store the certificates to decouple the blockchain layer and storage layer. In order to prevent the CA from issuing unauthorized certificates, we have added a condition to verify whether the issuing CA is consistent with the previous issuing CA in the certificate verification. The security analysis and experimental results show that LRS_PKI is both secure and efficient.

Certificate Transparency With Enhanced Privacy

Digital certificates play an important role in the authentication of communicating parties for transport layer security. Recently, however, frequent incidents such as the illegal issuance of fake certificates by a compromised certificate authority have raised concerns about the legacy certificate system. Certificate Transparency (CT) mitigates such issues by employing a log server to audit issued certificates publicly, making the certificate issuance and verification processes transparent. Unfortunately, the legacy CT ecosystem suffers from log server compromises and user browsing information leakage. Furthermore, the data structure for the certificate management in the legacy CT system incurs computation overhead linear to the number of registered certificates in the log. In this paper, we propose a secure CT scheme by leveraging a shared value tree (SVT), a novel log structure specifically designed to address the log server compromise and browsing information leakage problems. The verification time of SVT remains constant regardless of the number of registered certificates in the log. We analyze our scheme on the legacy CT system to demonstrate its incremental deployability, guaranteeing a smooth transition toward a more secure web ecosystem.

A Blockchain-Based Public Key Infrastructure For IoT-Based Healthcare Systems

Abstract Secure exchange of data among the various stake holders of healthcare systems is of prime importance. As the size of the healthcare networks grew, several variants of Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs) were proposed as a means to achieve reliable authentication, confidentiality, non-repudiation, etc. The most prevalent approach to PKI has been the use of Certificate Authorities (CAs). But, events like the breach of the CA DigiNotar, and the ensuing fake certificates for Google, among other noteworthy high-profile domains, has cast doubts on the reliability of a CA, and therefore on PKIs modelled as CAs too. In this paper, we propose a new approach to a healthcare PKI modelled on a blockchain, incorporating Elliptic Curve Cryptographic methods for secure key generations.

NON-FUNGIBLE TOKENS: ITS POTENTIAL ROLE IN COMBATTING CERTIFICATE FRAUDULENCE IN MALAYSIAN EDUCATION

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) are blockchain-based tokens that individually stand for a particular asset, such as a piece of media or digital data. A digital or physical asset can have an NFT as an irrevocable certificate of ownership and authenticity (Wang et al., 2021). Digital forms of certifications can consider using NFT and blockchain technology (Franceschet, 2021). Technological advancement made it possible for people to create fraud certificates, such as university degrees that the buyers do not actually possess. This is unethical and alarming. The current credentials from certificates are difficult to verify as legitimate, which encourages educational fraud. Blockchain technology with NFTs empowers a solution to certificate fraudulence. In this study, the demand of a handful of Malaysians towards buying fraud certificates and the ideas behind those that supply such certificates are scrutinized. Potential use cases and challenges on how NFTs can be used to combat certificate fraudulence and enhance education systems are studied by gathering information from past literatures and conducting interviews with people involved in certification fraud. The ethnography approach applied focuses on the occurrence of fake certificates in society that involves using certificates to seek employment or permit for incomes. Convenience sampling is applied to access the perspectives of respondents, who are also aware of NFT technology. The lack of coordination in Malaysia between multiple parties such as certificate issuers, companies hiring employees and government authorities allows certification fraud to occur. An increase of NFT public penetration and blockchain technology can counter this issue.

BOCA: A novel semantic blockchain-based authentication system of educational certificates

In industrial and academic working environments, illegitimate academic certificates have been prepared by individuals who aim to be employed without completing regulated training and education programs. This violation has made an unjust confusion between genuine and fake certificates. Within the hiring process, employers thus need a reliable mechanism for verifying academic certificates that ensures the integrity of data. In accordance with this aim, blockchain technology has been introduced and deployed at some universities supporting fraud prevention or secure access to certificates. However, the method of handling knowledge in these educational systems was not investigated devotedly. This paper introduces an authentication framework of educational certificates that employed blockchain and ontology technologies, named BOCA. The learning ontology (LeOn), which was used to represent the central knowledge model of the system, was assigned to semantically manage the domain knowledge and link the educational data to the blockchain network. The system features, including the working process, the LeON ontological development, and the rule base construction, are described in detail. The system deployment on Hyperledger Fabric yielded promising experimental results. Ongoing work focuses on improving system performance and allowing semantic search on data blocks.

Kepastian Hukum Penyelesaian Sengketa Atas Kepemilikan Ganda Terkait Dengan Pembebasan Tanah Untuk Kepentingan Umum

The land issue is a problem that is most closely related to the basic rights of the community. Land acquisition for the use of public interest is related to land that has a social function. Along with the high value and benefits of land, many people try to obtain proof of land ownership by having fake certificates, where the data on the certificate does not match what is in the land book. This study uses a normative juridical method which is supported by empirical juridical. Based on the results of research on court decisions Number 482/Pdt/2018/Pt.Bdg. shows that legal certainty over the dual ownership certificate has been achieved with the judge's decision granting the Plaintiff/Plaintiff's claim as the owner of the original land rights. Therefore, the National Land Agency must be more careful in making physical data and juridical data in carrying out the land registration process, and also for the next case the judge is more careful in examining the chronology of the occurrence of ownership of land rights, because it involves the certainty of the subject and object of ownership of rights. over the ground.

A Blockchain-Based Conceptual Model for Curbing Institutional Academic Certificate Fraud

There is need of certificate authentication mechanism in Africa, specifically in Kenya that will solve internal fraud activities. This is because there are many fake certificates in circulation that appear to be genuine but were obtained illegal from accredited universities. This is caused by the assumption that certificates being issued at the university are authentic. While authentication of the final academic certificate has been studied in previous research, many researchers focused on securing the final academic certificate and assumed that all certificates issued by universities are genuine thus creating a loophole for institutional certificate fraud. It’s possible for clients looking to get an academic certificate illegally to collude with university staff, who are responsible for generating the certificates, to acquire a legitimate academic certificate without going through the academic process. The purpose of this research is to develop a blockchain based model that solves the current problem of institutional certificate fraud. The research targets only Kenya public universities. Sampling will be done using simple random sampling to identify a few universities that will participate in the study. A combination of secondary data and primary data will be used in the research. Secondary data will be used to test the model while primary data will be used to construct the data mapping structure/model. Primary Data will be collected from the registry department using questionnaires and interviews while the sample will be obtained using stratified sampling. The model will be deployed using permissioned blockchain. The proposed model will have controls to ensure a student goes through the entire learning process before he is awarded an academic certificate.

Blockchain-based model to track and verify official certificates

Document verification is a complicated domain with a variety of difficult and time-consuming methods to validate. Customized verification and authentication processes may be required for various sorts of papers, such as financial papers, government papers, transaction papers, educational credentials, and so on. A huge problem today we are facing is the number of fake certificates that are in circulation, this problem is quite predominant. This has become a new business for a long time. Hardworking people with genuine degrees/certificates have been suffering and they get rejected in the job market because of the lack of identification to differentiate between the original and the fake certificate. At times people are getting jobs through fake certificates and this becomes very dangerous. The scenario calls for a new system that can verify and authenticate certificates, their issuers, and their holders in a way that is much more efficient, simple, and intuitive to use, and efficiently mitigates widespread credential fraud. To combat the counterfeiting of academic certificates, our blockchain approach combines a verified distributed ledger with a cryptographic mechanism. Our Blockchain technology will also provide a standard sharing platform for storing and accessing documents, reducing overall verification time and allowing companies to quickly monitor and access real papers. Our system that helps to identify original certificates will help the hard-earned people to get their jobs in their desired organizations and all the fake circulation of certificates will be stopped because the system identifies the genuine true certificates.

WHAT IS STILL FAKE IN THE MEDIA: A CHANGE OVER 20-YEARS’ TIME

In the modern world of high technologies, real opportunities and open information,fake becomes an integral part of life and one of the consequences of human activity. The age of excessive information and quick accessibility to any facts and news is concurrently the time of deficiencies. A lot of information which is obtained is insufficient, misleading, ambiguous, deceptive and absolutely fake. ‘Fake’ tends to substitute more and more real thing, notions and events and to modify real-life communication. It misleads, manipulates, misinforms, makes you believe in the possibility of “multiplicity of truths” and suggests the existence of multiple realities. The research offers a corpus-based analysis of collocations with FAKE in ‘The Economist’ issues published in 2001 and 2021. The two corpora have been processed with the help of Sketch Engine. The results obtained demonstrate a great shift in the media discourse within the 20-year period picturing what is fake. Only two things prove to be fake in both years: fake ID and fake card. In the year 2001 the main focus is on fake photography, image, watch, product. However, in the year 2021 the predominant topic is fake news, then there go the following collocations: fake information, link, account, order, divorce, personality, degree, certificate, medicine and vaccine. It seems that the frequency use has changed, 37 and 57 cases of FAKE as an adjective in the year 2001 and 2021 respectively.Collocations having a positive meaning in newspaper articles published in 2001 are the following fake pancreas, fake target, fake (threat) image, neutral collocations are fake parapets, fake pigeons, fake houses, fake waterway, and negative – fake Ids, fake documentation, fake profits, fake jobs, fake cuppa, fake watches, fake products; while in 2021 all collocations with FAKE are marked as negative (fake medicine, fake vaccine, fake ids, fake certificates,fake data, fake account, etc.).FAKE news proves to be the most frequently collocation in the media discourse of 2021.

Blockchain for Education: Verification and Management of Lifelong Learning Data

In recent years, blockchain technology has been applied in the educational domain because of its salient advantages, i.e., transparency, decentralization, and immutability. Available systems typically use public blockchain networks such as Ethereum and Bitcoin to store learning results. However, the cost of writing data on these networks is significant, making educational institutions limit data sent to the target network, typically containing only hash codes of the issued certificates. In this paper, we present a system based on a private blockchain network for lifelong learning data authentication and management named B4E (Blockchain For Education). B4E stores not only certificates but also learners’ training data such as transcripts and educational programs in order to create a complete record of the lifelong education of each user and verify certificates that they have obtained. As a result, B4E can address two types of fake certificates, i.e., certificates printed by unlawful organizations and certificates issued by educational institutions for learners who have not met the training requirements. In addition, B4E is designed to allow all participants to easily deploy software packages to manage, share, and check stored information without depending on a single point of access. As such, the system enhances the transparency and reliability of the stored data. Our experiments show that B4E meets expectations for deployment in reality.

Collaboration Blockchain Technology and Gamification in iLearning systems

Purpose: Currently, many fake certificates or diplomas are used to apply for jobs to get a better paying job. With that said, currently certificates cannot prove a person's expertise or skills. However, some students have implemented a Blockchain system in securing their certificates so that data manipulation is minimized, but only partially. Therefore, this research aims to motivate anyone, especially students in this Blockchain system and students will get incentives from all activities that are followed by racing in Blockchain gamification concept 4.0. Study design: This study uses the Pieces method to classify a problem (problem), opportunities (opportunities), and existing directions. Data collection techniques used primary data obtained by distributing questionnaires in the form of google form to respondents by involving students (n = 1129). Conclusions were analyzed with the SUS trial using a Likert scale with the cut and SUS method. Result: The results of this study are expected to Gamification in the system Blockchain can run optimally in implementation. The use of Gamification on the Alphabet Blockchain is included in the acceptable category. Value: The platform can check certificates that are not genuine.

Proposing a reliable method of securing and verifying the credentials of graduates through blockchain

Education acts as a soul in the overall societal development, in one way or the other. Aspirants, who gain their degrees genuinely, will help society with their knowledge and skills. But, on the other side of the coin, the problem of fake certificates is alarming and worrying. It has been prevalent in different forms from paper-based dummy certificates to replicas backed with database tampering and has increased to astronomic levels in this digital era. In this regard, an overlay mechanism using blockchain technology is proposed to store the genuine certificates in digital form and verify them firmly whenever needed without delay. The proposed system makes sure that the certificates, once verified, can be present online in an immutable form for further reference and provides a tamper-proof concealment to the existing certification system. To confirm the credibility of the proposed method, a prototype of blockchain-based credential securing and verification system is developed in ethereum test network. The implementation and test results show that it is a secure and feasible solution to online credential management system.

Improved Chaff-Based CMIX for Solving Location Privacy Issues in VANETs

Safety application systems in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) require the dissemination of contextual information about the scale of neighbouring vehicles; therefore, ensuring security and privacy is of utmost importance. Vulnerabilities in the messages and the system’s infrastructure introduce the potential for attacks that lessen safety and weaken passengers’ privacy. The purpose of short-lived anonymous identities, called “pseudo-identities”, is to divide the trip into unlinkable short passages. Researchers have proposed changing pseudo-identities more frequently inside a pre-defined area, called a cryptographic mix-zone (CMIX) to ensure enhanced protection. According to ETSI ITS technical report recommendations, the researchers must consider the low-density scenarios to achieve unlinkability in CMIX. Recently, Christian et al. proposed a Chaff-based CMIX scheme that sends fake messages under the consideration of low-density conditions to enhance vehicles’ privacy and confuse attackers. To accomplish full unlinkability, in this paper, we first show the following security and privacy vulnerabilities in the Christian et al. scheme: Linkability attacks outside the CMIX may occur due to deterministic data sharing during the authentication phase (e.g., duplicate certificates for each communication). Adversaries may inject fake certificates, which breaks Cuckoo Filters’ (CFs) updates authenticity, and the injection may be deniable. CMIX symmetric key leakage outside the coverage may occur. We propose a VPKI-based protocol to mitigate these issues. First, we use a modified version of Wang et al.’s scheme to provide mutual authentication without revealing the real identity. To this end, the messages of a vehicle are signed with a different pseudo-identity “certificate”. Furthermore, the density is increased via the sending of fake messages in low traffic periods to provide unlinkability outside the mix-zone. Second, unlike Christian et al.’s scheme, we use the Adaptive Cuckoo Filter (ACF) instead of CF to overcome the false positives’ effect on the whole filter. Moreover, to prevent any alteration of the ACFs, only RUSs distribute the updates, and they sign the new fingerprints. Third, the mutual authentication prevents any leakage from the mix zones’ symmetric keys by generating a fresh one for each communication through a Diffie–Hellman key exchange.

Rancang Bangun E-Sertifikat Berbasis Website Dengan Teknologi QRCode Menggunakan Metode Object Oriented Programming (Studi Kasus di Instansi Pendidikan Tinggi XYZ)

This research will discuss the analysis of the design and manufacture of website-based e-certificate applications using the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) method. The main problems that underlie this research are the waste in the use of paper and the cost of printing certificates, as well as the difficulty of distributing certificates to participants for every activity held in an agency. In addition, another problem is the number of fake certificates from activities that have been held and the difficulty of checking the authenticity of these certificates. Therefore, we need an application that can facilitate the making of certificates without having to be printed conventionally, assist in distributing certificates from activities that have been held to activity participants, as well as in checking the authenticity of certificates. For making applications using the OOP method with tools Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a tool in designing applications. The results achieved from this research are a website-based e-certificate application that will be used to print certificates digitally (paperless), distribute e-certificates from every activity organized by an agency, and check the authenticity of certificates using QRCode technology.

Blockchain Based Architecture for Certificate Authentication

Certificate Verification is the process of verifying a certificate issued by an institution and verifying that it is genuine and authentic Certificate issuing authorities appear to have compromised for student data protection certificates. Data is being disposed of and dishonest peoples can use this for their advantage. In preparation for solving this problem of forge certificates, the digital certificates are based on the BlockChain term. It is one of the recent technology which is able to be affected for data security. To verify the fidelity of those data, we relate a blockchain hash affirmative method. This prominence of blockchain helps to stricken the thing of the fake certificates. Authors have used two platforms of blockchain ehtereum and bitcoin for certificate verification. But those two platforms are permission-less blockchain where anyone can join the network. For making it more secured we can use the Hyper-Ledger platform which is more secured and only the present participants can join the network. This application demonstrates that blockchain-based hash validity has been developed to identify baleful and temporary changes in data. The technique that is discussed is that the main data is stored severally from the blockchain, then it allows a sense accessory and a hash of those data that presented to the blockchain, The original information is going to be verified against the hash in the block-chain at any moment.

Digital Certificate System for Verification of Educational Certificates using Blockchain

While the number of universities, tertiary education students and number of graduates per year constantly increase, the need to easily verify degree certificates generates new business opportunities. In this paper we project two financial models balancing where the price for the service is balanced between the graduate and the employer as the main stakeholders of that service. Students demand a proof-of-certification at low cost and easy to check, employers also demand quick and trustable verification of degrees when recruiting. As large number of students graduate every year, the problem of fake certificates is a big issue. One can easily get fake certificates in India. Companies hiring thousands of fresher spend large amount of money to get the educational certificates and transcripts verified of applicants. A Digital Certificate using blockchain technology can address this problem. Blockchain is a decentralized distributed digital ledger collectively maintained by a network of computers, called nodes. The data in the blockchain cannot be modified by a person without the consent of everyone else who maintains the records. This makes the data secure.

SCM: Secure and accountable TLS certificate management

SummaryIn classical public‐key infrastructure (PKI), the certificate authorities (CAs) are fully trusted, and the security of the PKI relies on the trustworthiness of the CAs. However, recent failures and compromises of CAs showed that if a CA is corrupted, fake certificates may be issued, and the security of clients will be at risk. As emerging solutions, blockchain‐ and log‐based PKI proposals potentially solved the shortcomings of the PKI, in particular, eliminating the weakest link security and providing a rapid remedy to CAs' problems. Nevertheless, log‐based PKIs are still exposed to split‐world attacks if the attacker is capable of presenting two distinct signed versions of the log to the targeted victim(s), while the blockchain‐based PKIs have scaling and high‐cost issues to be overcome. To address these problems, this paper presents a secure and accountable transport layer security (TLS) certificate management (SCM), which is a next‐generation PKI framework. It combines the two emerging architectures, introducing novel mechanisms, and makes CAs and log servers accountable to domain owners. In SCM, CA‐signed domain certificates are stored in log servers, while the management of CAs and log servers is handed over to a group of domain owners, which is conducted on the blockchain platform. Different from existing blockchain‐based PKI proposals, SCM decreases the storage cost of blockchain from several hundreds of GB to only hundreds of megabytes. Finally, we analyze the security and performance of SCM and compare SCM with previous blockchain‐ and log‐based PKI schemes.