Towards Using Blockchain Technology to Prevent Diploma Fraud

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 first present a general system structure for digitized diploma management systems and identify both functional and non-functional requirements. We then 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. Our analysis shows that the proposed solution respects all the identified requirements by design and can be further extended to enhance its security and privacy guarantees. Finally, we investigate the proposed solution’s computational complexity and demonstrate its practicality.