SPROOF: A Platform for Issuing and Verifying Documents in a Public Blockchain

Abstract

Managing educational certificates or records of personal achievements often comes at the cost of handling documents, loss of data or malicious counterfeits. Especially in the case of printed certificates, both the origin and the integrity of certificates are hard to verify. Furthermore, such documents can be lost or destroyed due to unseen circumstances. Reissuing certificates can then be cost intensive, hard or impossible, e.g., if the issuing organization has been closed. While issuing and signing documents digitally solves some of these issues, this still requires centralized trusted infrastructures and still does not allow for easy verification or recovery of lost documents. In this paper, we present SPROOF, a platform for issuing, managing and verifying digital documents in a public blockchain. In the proposed approach, all data needed for verification of documents and issuers is stored decentralized, transparent, and integrity protected. The platform is permissionless and thus no access restrictions apply. Rather, following principles of the Web of Trust, issuers can confirm each other in a decentralized way. Additionally, scalability and privacy issues are taken into consideration.