Blockchain Based Proof of Existence (PoE) Application for Educational Certificate Verification

Abstract

In this digital era, most of the documents such as Educational Certificates, Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)s/Agreements, Driving Licenses, Health Records, Employee Service Records, Sale Deeds and Property Registration Records, Birth and Death Certificates, Tax Returns, and so on are being generated and maintained as digital artifacts. But, people are misusing this facility by generating and submitting fake documents. The organization or person, whoever is receiving the documents, is unable to verify the authenticity and integrity of the submitted documents, so verification of these documents is a challenging task. To address this problem, Blockchain technology can be leveraged. Blockchain technology provides document authenticity, ownership, immutability, and tamper-proofness to the data recorded in it. Out of these digital documents, educational certificates are one of the most important entities to be secured as people keep hearing news about fake certificates. C-DAC has considered this as an important use case and implemented a Blockchain based solution for it. The organization, which is issuing the educational certificates, should issue certificates through Blockchain. Once a certificate is recorded on the Blockchain, it is persistent. Anyone can verify it by providing the unique identifier of the certificate such as student roll number, transaction ID, or cryptographic hash of the certificate. This will ease the verification process for the document receivers for verifying the authenticity and integrity of the document. And it also eliminates the role of third party verification agencies, which saves cost and increases the efficiency of verification.