A decentralized certificate verification platform
Nowadays, the problem of fake certificates is rising day by day and there's no mechanism to deal with the verification of certificates. We are aiming to build a system through which we can verify the authenticity of personal certificates in a trustless manner using Blockchain Technology.
Divanshu Prajapat
Kanakam Venkatam Vishnu Swaroop
Jay Patel
Rajat Singh
We know the current scenario where everyone is proving fake skills using invalid certificates. Because of this, the system is not able to work in the way it must work and people are not able to trust each other. What we are achieving in our concept is building a trustless system where the user can prove their genuine skills and remove the fraud of certifications. We are also providing a service where the organization can provide the certificate through our portal, which will remove the overhead from the organization's end of managing the certification process.
“As technology is advancing, the creation of fake certificates becomes easier. The forged certificates range from fake universities issuing certificates to forged certificates of existing reputed universities. Due to centralization and digitalization, this fake credentials problem has become a pain in the neck for both the universities and recruiting organizations, and it needs to be addressed with a sharp solution.” Job-seekers are using fake certificates to prove the skills that they don’t have, to get jobs in various sectors. Since universities issuing certificates store the data in their central database, anyone who has access to it can change it. We need a database that is immutable, decentralized and transparent, which are the main features of Blockchain.
We are developing a web solution where the certificate issuer can register their organization. The issuer has the freedom to register dierent courses for which they are providing certification and also has the freedom to design custom certificates for each course.After completion of the course, the issuer can add details of course participants to the respective courses.Participants will receive a certificate of the corresponding course in their mail. Participants can also see their certificates on their respective dashboard. When the issuer issues the certificate, the corresponding record will also be added to the Blockchain for
immutability and transparency. Each certificate has a QR code on it. To verify the certificate one needs to scan the QR and they will be redirected to our verification portal. On the verification page you will find all the details of the certificate.You can also verify the certificate with our records on the blockchain.
If some malicious actor corrupts our central database, we would not be able to retrieve the database back. Though we can still verify certificates through blockchain. But since we are using a one-way hashing algorithm to store data on the blockchain as hashes, we cannot reverse the hashes back to the original data.
If someone gets unauthorized access to some issuer dashboard, he/she may add false certificates to anybody's account. We may delete that false record from our central database, but it’s not possible to delete it from the blockchain.
This was our first hackathon, so working on the project in limited time was quite dicult. We divided the work among ourselves and worked together. The first issue we were facing was to generate qr code and draw it over a certificate template image. After many internet searches, reading documentation, we found the solution. We have used qrcode and canvas library to draw qr code over certificates.
When we hosted our project on Azure Vm , we were facing issues. Our frontend was not connected to the backend despite working on our local system. To address this issue, we open the port of VM on which the backend is running and access it using VM ip from the frontend.
This is around 0. 0286 INR. So we can see that our model is cost eective also.