DOC-BLOCK: A Blockchain Based Authentication System for Digital Documents

Abstract

With the rapid growth in the sector of information technology and easy access to cheap and advanced office instruments in the market, the faking of important documents has become a matter of concern nowadays. Therefore, the need for verification and authentication practices of various important documents in the form of banking documents, government documents, transaction documents, educational certificates etc is also increasing. However, various challenging and tedious processes have made document verification very complex and time-consuming which motivated us to conduct this research. In this paper, we present a decentralized web application for digital document verification using Ethereum blockchain-based technology in P2P cloud storage to enhance the verification process by making it more open, transparent, and auditable. The proposed model includes several methods such as public/private key cryptography, online storage security, digital signatures, hash, peer-to-peer networks and proof of work which has made the verification of any uploaded documents for any organization or authority faster and convenient with just a click. Furthermore, respective hash values are also assigned to each individual document. Our proposed model successfully meets up all the criteria for a digital document verification system by alleviating the gaps and difficulties in the traditional methods in document verification.