Electronic Student Records on Ethereum: File Management Model and Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Academic departments frequently exchange exam materials, assignment submissions, grade reports, attendance logs and durable student records. Conventional Learning Management Systems (LMS) centralize control and provide limited, non-portable audit trails which hinders cross-department collaboration and independent verification. This paper defines Electronic Student Records as encrypted, content-addressed documents anchored on Ethereum while data remain off chain and presents a practical model with a comparative analysis for department-level sharing. The model uses Sign-In with Ethereum (SIWE) for authentication, verifiable credentials for roles and consent, a minimal on-chain registry that records Keccak-256 digests, content identifiers, and timestamps with a policy reference and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage with institutional pinning and multiple gateways. Access control adopts proxy re-encryption, enforced with time windows and periodic key rotation. Updates always re-encrypt and re-upload so each version receives a new Content Identifier (CID) and digest. A compact evaluation contrasts Ethereum Layer 1 with Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups for registry events, single versus multi-gateway IPFS with two or more replicas and Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE) versus Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) as alternative keying strategies. The system reports metrics include chain cost, one-gateway (p50) and two-gateway (p95) read latency, availability under replication and revocation time under the re-upload policy. Findings indicate ZK rollups suit routine registry events, Layer1 suits high-value anchors, multi-gateway pinning improves tail latency and success rate and time-bounded PRE enables low-overhead revocation. The model offers a feasible path to privacy-preserving, auditable Electronic Student Records (ESRs) that integrate with existing LMS.