Paper 2021/1566 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2021/1566 ↗

Towards Using Blockchain Technology to Prevent Diploma Fraud

Abstract

After its debut with Bitcoin in 2009, Blockchain has attracted enormous attention and been used in many different applications as a trusted black box. Many applications focus on exploiting the Blockchain-native features (e.g. trust from consensus, and smart contracts) while paying less attention to the application-specific requirements. In this paper, we initiate a systematic study on the applications in the education and training sector, where Blockchain is leveraged to combat diploma fraud. We present a general system structure for digitized diploma management systems and identify both functional and non-functional requirements. Our analysis show that all existing Blockchain-based systems fall short in meeting these requirements. Inspired by the analysis, we propose a Blockchain-facilitated solution by leveraging some basic cryptographic primitives and data structures. Following-up analysis show that our solution respects all the identified requirements very well.