Privacy Protected Blockchain-based Architecture and Implementation for Sharing of Students’ Credentials

Sharing of students’ credentials is a necessary and integral process of an education ecosystem that comprises various stakeholders like students, schools, companies, professors and the governmental authorities. As of today, all these stakeholders have to put-in an enormous amount of efforts to ensure the authenticity and privacy of students’ credentials. Despite these efforts, the process of sharing students’ credentials is complex, error-prone and not completely secure. Our aim is to leverage blockchain technology to mitigate the existing security-related issues concerning the sharing of students’ credentials. Thus, the paper proposes a tamper-proof, immutable, authentic, non-repudiable, privacy protected and easy to share blockchain-based architecture for secured sharing of students’ credentials. To increase the scalability, the proposed system uses a secure off-chain storage mechanism. The performance and viability of the proposed architecture is analyzed by using an Ethereum based prototypical implementation. The test results imply that requests can be executed within few seconds (without block-time) and the system has stability to process up to 1000 simultaneous requests.