Developing and Implementing Blockchain Identity Management to Verify Students’ Certifications and Data (VeriOn)

Abstract

Every area of our life has been altered by technological improvements in the digital arena, from shopping to working, from staying in contact with friends to entertainment and not to mention managing our money. Identity management has been a major problem since the internet’s inception, with billions of dollars being spent on usability, security, and privacy. DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) or “Blockchain Technology” is the technology underpinning decentralized databases that allow users to govern the development of data across entities, via a peer-to-peer network, employing consensus techniques to ensure data replication among nodes. The fact that each block, where data is recorded, cannot be modified is what makes blockchain safe. Official education documentation does not provide complete information regarding academic performance during a certain period of study, course or semester. Furthermore, due to the participation of middlemen, academic accomplishment papers produced by universities are not protected against unauthorized alterations. This research presents a successful platform, called VeriOn, which was built on Ethereum-blockchain open-source and a consortium type of decentralized, open-sourced blockchain Ethereum. The proposed system is built on a worldwide distributed P2P network, which enables the organization to collaborate with the blockchain network, in order to trace student / employee data, verify academic success, and exchange information with others. To solve the issues universities experience in storing and safeguarding the data, VeriOn platform was built using a consortium, blockchain architecture. Crucially, this paper presents an implementation of this architecture as a proof of concept.