Blockchain-Based E-Governance and Academic Certificate Management

Abstract

Certificate management systems encompass aca-demic records; government-issued documents; professional li-censes; notary services.They play a vital role in creating a modern e-government system.Current certificate management methods are plagued by forgery, slow veri-fication, fragmented records between several institutions and vulnerability to compro-mise because of increasing numbers of data breaches.Blockchain innovations create the potential to address these different chal-lenges given their unique features such as: immutability, de-centralization, cryptographic security and full traceability via transparent auditability.The objective of this paper is to combine the current research on certificate management with blockchain technology via a systematic review of 12 peer-reviewed journals which focus on: Research methods used by each author.Data sets used by each author.The evaluation environment used by each author.The performance and security metrics that are being utilized in each author's research.The comparative findings of each author's research with respect to certificate management using public and permissioned blockchains.Results of this study demonstrate that the current core tech-nical functionality of certificate management using blockchain has been established; however, there are still major gaps in the current body of knowledge that need to be addressed, including:1. Privacy solutions, specifically zero-knowledge proofs.2. Ability to scale to the national level.3. Cross-platform interoperability.4. Validation of real-world prototypes.Additionally, we have described each of these gaps explic-itly and created a prioritized future agenda for research that addresses issues related to privacy, scalability, interoperability, security auditing and user-centered evaluation.