Blockchain based Privacy Preserving Student’s Certificate Storage, Distribution and Verification

The blockchain is a chain of blocks with each block header containing a hash of its preceding block. Blockchain technology transforms the existing centralized system, trusting the third party, into a decentralized system that can exchange or store information within a trustless environment while preserving privacy and security. The transactions and data stored in the blockchain are not pursuant to the control of any mediator. The technology is now widely used in medical records, education, supply chain, and IoT. The paper implements a prototype model of a decentralized application for an education record verification and sharing system. In the current education system, institutions manage their data on a centralized server. Students are handed over a certificate as a hard copy at the end of the course. In this scenario, corroborating the authentication of a hard copy is very difficult because counterfeiting the original certificate is effortless. In this paper, we introduce a blockchain-based proposal to substantiate the authenticity of transcripts and share them. Blockchain-based applications can hasten the transcript corroboration and sharing process by transforming the centralized approach into a decentralized one. The users of the blockchain- based system get lifelong authorized access to their transcripts and can share them with other institutes or organizations. We use IPFS blockchain-based decentralized cloud for storage, it can minimize the cost up to 86% and proxy re-encryption provide secure exchange without compromising the complexity.