Certificate Chain using Blockchain

Background

As a child is born and goes through the phases of education, employment and retirement, he / she
is required to produce several documents to get admission in school , college , university ,
employer , Government etc. Documents such as birth certificate, study certificate, transfer
certificate, degree certificates, income, caste etc. are required almost every year for the purpose
of admission to educational institution/ hostel , concessions, scholarship, availing reservation
quota based on social status etc.

One of the challenges faced in the admission process for higher education in India & abroad and
selection of the candidates for the jobs is the verification of the certificates produced by the
candidates. The verification of the correctness and genuineness of the certificate with the
concerned universities or boards not only takes months , it also takes the effort and processing
time. Hence most of the times, the institutes and companies will go by the original produced by
the candidates. Even if the candidate has given the fake certificate, they have to accept and
proceed. This challenge is faced for many years without any proper solution.
To overcome this challenge, National Informatics Centre has come up with the solution using
Blockchain Technology and the solution is called as Certificate Chain. This Certificate Chain
ensures that certificates are recorded in secured, tamper proof and traceable manner. And these
certificates are accessed online by any one in trustable and verifiable manner.

Challenges
On one hand, A person has to go from pillar to post to obtain these certificates as some of these have a validity period also.
On the other hand, it is equally difficult for the accepting authorities like the educational institutes, Government who
spend heavily on the verification of these documents. Since the volumes are large, a small fraction of fake documents
entering the system is alarming and a great cause for concern as this could lead to ineligible candidates gaining benefit
while depriving the deserving candidates.

As a specific case, the Karnataka Examination Authority which conducts the Common Entrance Examination for
admission to professional colleges has a great challenge in verification of the documents submitted by the students of
Karnataka and from other states. Various certificates such as X Standard marks card, caste, income, rural area certificate
etc. are submitted by the student to claim reservation. Verification of the documents is a humungous task.

The welfare departments also spend significant time to verify the claims of the student while applying for school / college
admission, scholarships, hostel admission etc.
Proposed Solution
The issue pertaining to of fake certificates can be eliminated by building a trusted environment for the KEA authorities by
enabling the issuers of the certificates to store the certificate details in the block chain. Going forward all the certificate
details required by a student can be stored in the blockchain. Some amount of meta data also needs to be stored in the
system for electronic data comparison. The different departments / agencies who need to be part of the blockchain network
to contribute and use these certificates are -
Municipalities / Revenue Department– The birth certificate, caste, income, rural area certificates are issued by the revenue
department and municipalities. These documents are very important to the citizens and several benefits are given by the
other Government departments based on the availability of the documents. Department of Education – Study certificate,
Transfer certificate, School completion certificates, marks cards are issued. The details of the class, marks, attendance of
the students need to be stored in the blockchain.
Welfare departments – Departments of social / Tribal / Minorities / Backward classes welfare departments run hostels for
poor students and also provide scholarship for poor / meritorious students. Based on the income, grades and caste, the
blockchain system can prepare a list of eligible students for awarding of scholarship / fee concessions.
Employers - The Government as an employer needs to verify the caste, income certificates along with educational
certificates to provide employment based on reservation policy of the Government. Committees are constituted by the
Government for the purpose of verification of the documents submitted as proof of claim by the applicant. It would be
extremely easy for all agencies to verify the eligibility using the blockchain data.
For the older certificates issued by the agencies, the student can upload the certificate meta data and stored in the block
chain and the respective departmental systems can trigger a request to the issuing agency to notarize the certificate details.
A process for any change in the certificate details can implemented in the departmental applications would initiate a
transaction to the blockchain system. Since the changes will also be part of the
Technology used in Certificate Chain

Certificate Chain has been established using the Blockchain Technology to record the educational
certificates of various boards, by linking them like a chain. Certificate Chain records the certificates in
distributed manner in multiple locations. Certificates in this chain are secured, tamper proof and
immutable. Attempt to tamper the data is not possible as all the distributed locations need to be updated as
per the agreement to synchronise the data between them.
FEATURES OF CERTIFICATE CHAIN

Certificate Chain records the certificates in the shared/distributed manner with all the participating
stakeholders. The certificates are recorded in the chain based on the consensus between the stakeholders.
This eliminates the need for dependency on the third party. The certificates are linked and stored with
cryptographic security so that they are immutable and traceable. The linking of the blocks in the
blockchain ensures that they cannot be tampered with. The certificates are trustable as they can be
verified across the participating stakeholders.

 Secured
 Trusted
 Immutable
  Traceable
 Verifiable

Benefits of Certificate Chain

Benefits
Facilitating the student, Education institutions, Government and Non-Government agencies to have access to tamperproof
record of certificate details. This system will reduce the errors in manual verification of the document. The process of
preparing the eligibility list would be simplified and automated due to the availability of all necessary data from a single
source. The establishment of the certificate chain will change the way the Government processes applications for
admission, recruitment, scholarships, social security pensions and various other government initiatives . This system could
pave the way for entitlement based service delivery.

Certificate Chain provides the trustable, immutable and traceable certificates. It can be used by the
various educational institutes for admission for higher studies and companies for job offers. It can also be
used for the online counselling by the institutes. The financial institutes can also use this system for
sanctioning of educational loans and other loans based on the qualification of the applicants.

 Transparent
 Tamper Proof
 Paperless
 No dependency on third party

Users of Certificate Chain

Certificate Chain provides the mechanism for the educational institutes and companies to verify online
the details of the claims of the applicants, who applies for the higher education or job. It also helps in
counseling process, by integrating the systems with plug-in interfaces. This certificate chain aims to
provide the educational certificate details of various boards and universities in coming days. Thus,
eliminating the need to depend upon the third party to carry out the verification. It also drastically saves
the time for verification and promotes the paperless verification.

 Students
 Educational Institutes
 Job Providers
 Financial Institutes

Contents in Certificate Chain

As indicated above, the Certificate Chain contains the Certificates of the various universities and boards.
As and when the new certificate is issued by these universities or boards, they will send the signed
certificates to the Certificate Chain and Certificate Chain will link these certificates and build the chain
and will store securely in the certificate Chain.

Presently, SSLC and PUE Boards of the Karnataka are participating in the chain and going to start the
storing the certificates from year 2020 and gradually go back for the previous years. The other boards and
universities have also shown interest in participating in this chain.

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