Today, the credibility of academic records is a major concern. Universities mandate that students get their educational documents verified by third-party institutions before admitting them to their desired degree program. Verification of these documents requires time and monetary resources which are usually very high and are totally born by the students. To solve this problem, we propose that a decentralized network of universities and students is built which guarantees the authenticity of a document using the blockchain technology.
It leverages the Azure Blockchain workbench to create a decentralized blockchain network of universities and students. Every block in the network represents a one-to-one relationship between a student and a university and the information stored in that block is the academic record of that student associated with that particular university. There can be two major transactions:
- Generation of academic record and initialization of a new block in the network based on the new records.
- Verification of the academic record shared by a prospective student with their university.
The motivation behind using blockchain is that it is a decentralized system, tamper-proof and transparent which are all the properties of the data storage system we intend to build.
We used the Azure Blockchain Workbench platform as it provides ways of authenticating the two individual entities involved in a transaction which ensures that the information is generated by a genuine party and is received by a genuine party.
We used JSON and Solidity files format to represent the state diagrams and implementing the functionality of different transactions. We used Python's flask framework for building the backend which communicates with the Azure Blockchain Workbench platform using REST API calls.
Azure Blockchain Workbench is still in preview and has bugs that create issues in deploying the network.
We were able to learn, implement and build a project based on a totally new technology i.e. Blockchain over the weekend.
We want to scale and generalize the network so that the same model can be mapped to different fields for storing and accessing confidential and credible information.