Since certificate storage and its security is a matter of concern to the university, students, and employers, the proposed system provides a platform to store and verify the student credentials using Blockchain technology. Whenever a certificate is added into a block, it will return a unique certificate Id along with student Aadhar card number as Primary key. With the help of the unique certificate id student can verify the certificate and also the company can verify whether the certificate provided by the student is authorized or not. Apart from that, there will be an aadhar card number of each student, by using which verifier can see all the certificates listed in the name of the same person and will be easy to verify individually. In the process to add the certificate, the certificate authority has to pay some Ethereum gas value which will be reduced from the certificate authority account. This is needed for the miners which will later help to add the blocks in the blockchain in return for which they are awarded these Ethereum coins. As the blockchain is distributed in nature and is popularly known as a distributed ledger, it is not easy to tamper the data stored in a block. Though not impossible, it becomes harder and harder to insert new data or modify the existing data as the length of the chain increases. It also acts as a bridge between institutions and industries. The institutions can store the candidates’ academic credentials on this safe platform. And on the other hand, the industries can verify them by using the transaction id and unique candidate id like the aadhar card number.
The advantages of this application are:
1. No one can tamper or create any fake degrees.
2. Employer verification becomes easy and seamless.
Each Block contains:
Nonce
|
Student Id
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Marks Statement
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Time Stamp
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Hash of the Previous Block
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In the proposed system, every block contains the information shown in Fig. 2. The fields are selected to include the necessary information and may vary depends upon the requirements.
1. Nonce: A random value added by the miner to solve the hash puzzle
2. Student Id: Aadhar Id.
3. Marks Statement: The details like Roll No., Name, Class, Subjects and Marks are entered in text format.
4. Time Stamp: Date and Time of creation of the block
5. Hash Value: The cryptographic hash value, which is calculated using SHA-256, of the previous block to link this new block to the existing chain
This system will maintain the integrity and security of the certificates and helps to avoid fake certificate generation. If all the companies and universities start using this portal, there will be no way to create a fake certificate and deceive the recruiter company or any further verifier. Even the timestamp will show the exact time of the certificate generated that will cover an extra layer in the security to the university certificate generation process. The proposed system acts as an overlay to the existing method of issuing physical or digital certificates by the universities and autonomous colleges.
As shown in Fig. 3, the blocks are created and attached to the chain by the Certificate authorities(Universities / Autonomous Colleges) and the copies of the blockchain are distributed among the peer nodes of the corresponding universities and autonomous colleges. While adding the credentials to the blockchain, every entry will get a unique transaction id(address) which can be further quoted whenever required to retrieve or verify the data along with his aadhar id. Through the application designed, the verifiers(recruiting companies) can access the blockchain and complete the process within no time, reliably, and also can get the details of that particular employee id.
4.1 Data Intervening Proposed:
In this paper, a method of data uploading, called Data Intervening, is proposed to facilitate the uploading of alumni data. The concept of Data Intervening is explained with a simple example as shown in Fig. 4. In this case, the Institute needs to upload data from the year of inception, say 2016–2017, then it is proposed to initiate the blockchain from a reference academic year, say 2018–2019, upload the data of one year forward and one year backward as shown in the Figure. After reaching the year of inception, data uploading can be streamlined and continue in a normal way. This method helps even very old universities can include their alumni data without any hurry.
4. 2 Why Blockchain?
One has to check some parameters before applying the blockchain technology to solve any existing problem. They are:
1. Are multiple parties involved in the data exchange?
2. Do different parties update data?
3. Is it required to verify the data stored?
4. Do the process of verification takes significant time and money?
5. Is the time stamp of the data has any significance?
6. Are the transactions of various parties depends on one another?
If at least 4 of the six above questions got the answer 'Yes', then it is apt to go with blockchain implementation. In this credentials securing and verification system, almost all questions get the answer 'Yes'. Hence it clearly shows that the problem of fake certificates and delays in the verification process can be solved using blockchain technology.