A Comprehensive Blockchain-Based System for Educational Qualifications Management and Verification to Counter Forgery

Abstract

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.