Degree Validation Application Using Solidity and Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

One of the most common actions for students post-graduation is requesting a degree validation or an official transcript of grades. Requests for degree validations happen for various reasons such as an employment requirement, a pursuit of a higher degree education, foreign degree accreditation, or even for a personal reason. Those who are requesting the degree validation are usually on a time constraint. Traditional methods of degree validation are often complicated, time consuming, require manpower to maintain, and potentially have security or privacy issues. We present a software application implementing an automatic degree validation system that uses the Ethereum, an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform, and that features smart contract functionality. The application is developed using Solidity, a contract-oriented programming language, and is run by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This application allows students and universities to automatically verify each other's identity while maintaining transaction validity and referential integrity through a blockchain ledger and maintaining security through PGP key authentication. The university checks the student's request against its own secure mongoDB database. Our application also generates the student's Ehereum wallet using the Truffle development Ethereum network. Truffle generates the student's private and public keys. Our Application pulls the student public key, hashes the last 20 bytes, generates Keccak256 Hash, and stores it on the MongoDB as the student Ethereum Address. To ensure the information's privacy, the blocks of the blockchain are mainly formed of two encrypted fields using the Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) library. The first field is encrypted using the student's public key and the second field is encrypted using the third party public field. Third parties, such as employers or other higher education institutions, are able to check its encrypted field of the block using its own private key, once the degree is validated or the transcript is generated. Results of testing show our application to be scalable, secure, have efficient gas costs on the Ethereum network, and minimize human interaction.