Certifying Digitally Issued Diplomas

Abstract

We describe a protocol for creating, updating, and revoking digital diplomas that we anticipate would make use of the protocol for transferring digital assets elaborated by Goodell, Toliver, and Nakib. Digital diplomas would maintain their own state, and make use a distributed ledger as a mechanism for verifying their integrity. The use of a distributed ledger enables verification of the state of an asset without the need to contact the issuing institution, and we describe how the integrity of a diploma issued in this way can persist even in the absence of the issuing institution.