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StuChain: an efficient blockchain-based student e-portfolio platform integrating hybrid access control approach

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Abstract

Electronic portfolios are crucial means to evaluate the performance of students. However, the traditional student e-portfolio(SEP) system cannot meet the needs of guaranteeing students' information safety due to the system using centralized third-party storage. In addition, the SEP system involves multiple stakeholders and has an extreme volume of learning data, while the current access control model fails to satisfy the requirements of the SEP system. Blockchain technology provides a possible solution to the issues, while the massive data stored in the blockchain can cause congestion in the blockchain network. Therefore, we propose StuChain, an efficient blockchain-based SEP platform integrating a hybrid access control approach, to solve the above problems. Firstly, we design a hybrid access control model to manage and share student e-portfolio. Secondly, we propose to use blockchain technology to solve the security issue and design smart contracts to realize identity certification, recording, access control management, and sharing. Thirdly, we present an efficient storage approach, which achieves massive storage without threatening the system’s efficiency. The student e-portfolio information is encrypted through the symmetric encryption scheme(AES-128), signed through the Edwards-curve digital signature algorithm (EdDSA), and recorded in the off-chain. We store the corresponding storage address and hash values in the blockchain. Finally, we conduct theoretical analysis and extensive experiments. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that our proposed approach outperforms other schemes. Experimental results show that our proposed StuChain can achieve secure and efficient storage, fine-grained access control, and our proposed system maintains high throughput.

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Funding

This work is supported by “Research on Automatic Segmentation and Recognition of Teaching Scene with the Characteristics of Teaching Behavior” of National Natural Science Foundation of China [61977034]. It is also supported by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities named “Research on Intelligent Decisionmaking and Service Platform for ** based on Knowledge Graph” (CCNU22JC027), and “Research on Intelligent Evaluation Technology and Application of Teachers’ Teaching Ability based on Multimodal Data” (CCNU22JC011).

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  1. School of Educational Information Technology, Faculty of Artificial Intelligence in Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China

    Gang Zhao, Hui He, Bingbing Di & Jie Chu

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  1. Gang Zhao
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Correspondence to Hui He.

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Zhao, G., He, H., Di, B. et al. StuChain: an efficient blockchain-based student e-portfolio platform integrating hybrid access control approach. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 227–251 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-15560-1

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