EduBlock: Securing Educational Documents using Blockchain Technology
Pavitra Haveri, U.B. Rashmi, D. G. Narayan, K. Nagaratna, K. Shivaraj
Abstract
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies are the most popular and the earliest applications of Blockchain. A Blockchain is a public ledger that is distributed and decentralized and it is used to carry out transactions online across the entire network of computer systems. It is a recent technology adopted for data security. The non-modifiable property of the blockchain helps to overcome the problem of document forgery. According to researches, about one million students graduate each year and the document issuing authorities have seemed to be compromised for the security credentials of student data. Due to a lack of effective anti-forge mechanism, forged documents often get unnoticed. The use of physical copies of documents creates a huge overhead as it involves manual verification, paper storage, and manual auditing. Various agencies fail to verify the authenticity of the documents and create loopholes. In this paper, in an attempt to solve the above problem, we design a multi-node private blockchain network using the Ethereum framework and create an off-chain storage i.e. private Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to store the documents. We also evaluate the performance of Ethereum blockchain by analysing the impact of various parameters such as varying difficulty level, load, network size, and consensus algorithms.