A Blockchain Based System for Preventing Academic Forgery: Design and Practical Evaluation for CPU-Based and Low-Power Computers

Abstract

This paper describes a lightweight proof-of-concept that tackles the problem of academic certificate forgery with the use of a smart contract deployed in the Ethereum blockchain. The implemented application allows to request, update, download and verify students Academic Records (AR) easily. These ARs are backed up by a decentralized storage system based on InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The ARs modifications are secured and tamper-proof, since they need to be approved by the network. Furthermore, this proof-of-concept was conceived to support future functionalities such as the verification of Curriculum Vitae (CV) merits, so its architecture could be the basis of many other types of decentralized applications. Not only was the application tested in terms of energy efficiency and performance, but it was also deployed on Single-Board Computers (SBCs) to evaluate its performance in an IoT network.