A Faster, Integrated, and Trusted Certificate Authentication and Issuer Validation System Based on Blockchain

Verifying the legitimacy of original documents such as educational degree certificates is crucial. If these are found to be fraudulent, it can cause significant disruptions in the hiring process, resulting in substantial productivity losses. The researchers suggested several proposals to preserve these certificates. However, the challenge is still to have an integrated, tamper-proof and low-cost solution where the certificate issuer and the certificate itself are validated in a single platform. This paper proposes an integrated solution that uses a decentralized blockchain-based certificate verification and issuer validation system. In addition to this, it will protect the certificates from being tampered with. To search faster, hash function mapping has been employed. The proposed solution is experimentally validated by creating a blockchain network using Ethereum where each peer node represents an entity of a certificate verification system such as a validator, certificate issuer, certificate holder and the end-user of the client. The performance of the designed solution is measured by the execution and transaction cost in terms of gas consumption. A comparative analysis has been performed on similar types of tasks reported in the existing work performed on the same platform. It has been observed that the cost incurred for adding a certificate is minimal for the proposed approach. Furthermore, the searching time for the certificates is minimized by using a hash-based searching methodology. The results show that the search time has drastically gone down when certificates are not available.