Hybrid Approach for Certificate Verification using Blockchain in Cloud Environment

Abstract The current analog system for managing educational certificates was unreliable and slow. Students have to request their official transcripts from their university registrar and pay their fees for each copy of the transcript requested. The person who has acquired the credentials should be in charge of them, but most of the time the students have to rely on third parties, such as universities or employers to store, verify and validate the credentials. Employers and universities still at times need to call the issuing authority of the certificate if they want to be sure that the transcript was not faked. It’s complicated and tedious, which is one of the major factors for fraud. Making certificates easily verifiable and transferable is one advantage of digital systems. There are several advantages of creating a digital infrastructure for certificates, but the stakes are high as such systems will grow forward to represent our professional reputations. When proposing a digital method of processing certificates, the elimination of counterfeit certificates from the system should be given top priority. Using a hash-based storage method to assure the authenticity and security of digital content kept on the platform, colleges can submit student certificates and authenticate certificates from other member universities. A permissioned blockchain-based system is employed in the proposed system for the safe verification of academic degrees. The Raft ordering service is used to handle numerous distributed orderers. Universities can upload their student's credentials and validate the certifications of other member universities. A hash-based storage system is used to store the digital contents of the certificate in order to guarantee its authenticity and security. The certificate will be hashed using the SHA-256 technique, then stored in a blockchain. The student can use this hash value to further verify their certificate. The university's reputation is determined using the Beta Reputation Algorithm. This is done in order to avoid or remove the network organization that helps phoney certificates or fake validation. The system can be accessed from any location in the globe if it is set up in a cloud environment.