Browsing by Author "Said, Said"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A Blockchain-based Conceptual Model to Address Educational Certificate Verification Challenges in Tanzania
    (Engineering, Technology & Applied Science Research (ETASR), 2023-08-08) Said, Said; Dida, Mussa; Kosia, Efraim; Sinde, Ramadhani
    The proliferation of counterfeit educational certificates is an ongoing issue around the world, including Tanzania. The effect of this malpractice is detrimental to the credibility of education. Traditional strategies to prevent fake certificates are abortive, calling for a more sophisticated approach. Blockchain technology has recently emerged as an ideal solution to this problem due to its inherent attributes that ensure disintermediation, immutability, tamper proof, anonymity, transparency, consensus, security, and trust. However, most existing blockchain-based solutions lack crucial functionalities that are pertinent to the Tanzanian education system. This study unveiled the challenges faced by the current verification system in Tanzania and proposed a blockchain-based conceptual model to address them. The proposed model is based on blockchain, smart contracts, and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to investigate certification problems in Tanzania and modeling techniques were used to construct the conceptual model. The findings showed that the main challenges of the current verification system emanate from manual procedures, unverifiable credentials, susceptibility of centralized storage systems, disintegrated verification systems, revocation problems, difficulties in communication, and high dependency on the issuers. These challenges undermine certificate verification, impose a significant setback in the fight against forgeries, and create loopholes for forgeries to persist. It was conceptually demonstrated that these issues can be resolved through the proposed blockchain-based solution.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A Comprehensive Blockchain-Based System for Educational Qualifications Management and Verification to Counter Forgery
    (IEEE Access, 2025-02-17) Said, Said; Sinde, Ramadhani; Kosia, Efraim; Dida, Mussa; Ulomi, George
    The prevalence of fake educational credentials poses a threat to the meritocratic nature of the education system and job markets. Verification of certificates to combat forgery has been a challenging endeavor due to the weaknesses of the current methods. Blockchain, capitalizing on its unique attributes, can provide an optimal solution to certification and verification problems by ensuring disintermediation, immutability, tamper-proof, efficiency, and security. Efforts to explore its potential in addressing these problems continue to gain momentum. However, the existing blockchain-based initiatives do not offer a holistic solution to the forgery problem, as they solely focus on a single education level or institution. Furthermore, these initiatives lack the essential features required to fully address this problem. This paper proposes a comprehensive blockchain-enabled system for issuing certificates from different educational levels and institutions in the country, providing a one-stop center for verifiers, such as employers, to verify all certificates a candidate possesses. As a proof of concept, a decentralized application (DApp), ElimuChain, has been developed, utilizing smart contracts and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The system is deployed on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) blockchain to evaluate its applicability in addressing the problem in the Tanzanian context. The results demonstrate that the proposed solution successfully manages the certification and verification process, and it is cost-effective, scalable, and efficient. Moreover, its performance was compared with the previous solutions in terms of latency and throughput. The comparison results show that it performs better than the counterpart for transactional operations.