A Self-Sovereign and Privacy-Preserving Approach to Decentralized Academic Credential Verification using Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of digital educational credentials has intensified challenges related to credential fraud, privacy infringement, and reliance on centralized verification infrastructures. Conventional credential verification mechanisms depend on Public Key Infrastructure managed by centralized Certificate Authorities, resulting in single points of failure, limited scalability, and increased operational overhead. Although blockchain-based credentialing approaches introduce immutability and tamper resistance, such solutions often suffer from a privacy–transparency trade-off, as verification commonly requires exposing complete credential data or associated metadata on public ledgers. A privacy-preserving decentralized framework for Self-Sovereign Identity and Verifiable Credentials is presented to address these limitations. The proposed architecture combines distributed ledger-based trust anchoring with zero-knowledge cryptographic techniques to enable secure and confidential credential verification. Credential commitments are immutably anchored on a high-throughput consensus network, while verification is performed using Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge, enabling proof of credential validity without revealing underlying secrets or sensitive attributes. Verification is conducted without continuous involvement of the issuing authority, thereby eliminating centralized dependency and improving system availability. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the framework supports sub-second proof generation and millisecond-level verification, while maintaining minimal on-chain storage and predictable operational costs. The results indicate that the proposed approach provides a scalable, efficient, and privacy-respecting solution for decentralized academic credential verification in modern digital identity ecosystems.