BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TEMPER-PROOF AND DECENTRALIZED FRAMEWORK FOR EDUCATIONAL DOCUMENTS VERIFICATION

Abstract

The fast digitalization of the educational systems has contributed greatly to the demands of secure, reliable, and efficient mechanisms for verifying academic documents. Existing verification systems are centralized, manual, and time-consuming, and hence susceptible to document forgery, data tampering, and inefficiency in operations. To alleviate these issues, this paper presents a Blockchain-Based Tamper-Proof and Decentralized Educational Documents Verification Framework that provides a high level of security, transparency, and trust without any references to a single authoritative organization. The developed framework uses a permissioned blockchain system that has been implemented with cryptographic hashing (SHA-256), cryptography-based digital signatures, and Merkleized block formations to ensure there is integrity and non-mutability of the data. Educational certificates are created in a standardized format of JSON, hashed, signed by authorized institutions, and anchored safely on the blockchain. Confirmation is carried out by re-hashing document hashes and cryptographic signatures with immutable ledger records so that instant and reliable authentication can be done. To simulate realistic academic workloads, an academic system prototype model was developed and tested with synthetic certificate datasets. Several experiments were conducted on changing the key parameters like the batch size, worker parallelism, and certificate tampering rates to determine scalability, performance, and resiliency. Experimental outcomes indicate that it has high issuance throughput (up to 952 transactions per second (TPS)), effective verification performance, low median latency (between 3 and 4 ms), and can detect a tamper (TDR = 100%), and zero false acceptance and false rejection in all test conditions. The results of this research work affirm that blockchain technology, with an effective batching and parallel processing policy, can be used to offer a scalable and secure solution to large-scale examination of educational documents. The study provides a validated framework and empirical evidence that can be used to implement blockchain-based credential verification systems in an academic and institutional setting.