Digital education transaction object authentication service based on blockchain technology

Abstract

With the rapid development of E-Learning, the demand for high-quality personalized education services and resources has increased rapidly. In order to meet this demand, a project called “Digital Education Crowdfunding and Crowdcreating Personalized Service Platform Development and Application Demonstration” was launched in China. The goal of the project is to provide a personalized education resource and service trading platform for producers, suppliers, and users by joint investment and collaborative creation. So how to ensure the authenticity and credibility of the objects (education resources and services) involved in this multi-party participated service platform becomes a challenging task. Blockchain is emerging as a promising technology that enables people to make secure and reliable transactions because of the decentralization and collective maintenance features. Thus in this letter we proposed a novel blockchain-based authentication service for digital education transaction object to resolve the problem of education transaction object authentication among different education institutions. We constructed information models for the two types object and stored the metadata information of the model on the blockchain to make it transparent and safe. And smart contracts are designed to authenticate education transaction object automatically among different education institutions. To improve the performance of blockchain-based authentication service, an improved consensus process for blockchain network is proposed and incorporated into our prototype system. Performance simulation is carried out and the experimental results demonstrate the practicality of our blockchain-based authentification service.