Enhanced privacy-preserving in student certificate management in blockchain and interplanetary file system

Blockchain technology is popular due to properties such as immutability, transparency, distributed storage, and control decentralisation. Student certificates and skill verification are used for job applications and other purposes. Forgery of certificates with centralised authority is a major issue in online education. This challenge can be solved by using blockchain-based certificate management for students and skill evidence management for employees. However, these types of certificate managements have many issues like security and privacy breaches, fear of cyber-attack, hijacking of the session, identity theft of participants, etc. Because blockchain uses cryptographic hash and digital signature for sending and verifying transactions in blockchain peer-to-peer networks, we can overcome many security and privacy difficulties. We proposed a system that generates the identity of students using the tokens and stores them in the interplanetary file system (IPFS). The proposed system makes use of IPFS and EdDSA (Edward-curve Digital Signature Algorithm) for digital signature and verification, as well as SHA-256 for cryptographic hashing. Our proposed system results provide the transaction speed, time required for per transaction, and time required for signing and verifying a transaction. We compare our proposed system with the previously developed systems in terms of privacy, transaction cost, large file storage, blockchain implementation and registration cost.

Automated summary

Blockchain technology is popular for its properties, but certificate management faces issues. Using blockchain can improve security and privacy in certificate management.