Blockchain-Enabled Learning Management Systems: Redefining Trust and Security in Digital Education

Abstract

The widespread adoption of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) as mission-critical digital infrastructures in higher education has introduced significant security and trust challenges. While centralized LMS architectures provide operational efficiency, they remain structurally vulnerable to insider threats, silent database compromise, mutable audit logs, and credential forgery. Existing blockchain-based research in education has largely focused on certificate authentication and transcript portability, leaving internal LMS integrity and enterprise-grade threat mitigation insufficiently addressed. This paper proposes a blockchain-enabled audit extension architecture for LMS environments, designed to enhance assessment integrity, traceability, and institutional trust without replacing existing platforms. Building upon a formal threat model tailored to LMS infrastructures, we derive security requirements including immutability, non-repudiation, auditability, confidentiality, and trust separation. To satisfy these requirements, we introduce a permissioned distributed ledger layer based on Hyperledger Fabric, operating alongside the institutional Information System. The architecture employs event-based transaction modeling, identity-bound cryptographic signatures, distributed endorsement policies, and minimal on-chain storage through hash anchoring of sensitive data. A proof-of-concept implementation within a controlled institutional test network demonstrates the feasibility of recording grade submission and modification events as append-only ledger transactions. The prototype validates distributed validation, identity attribution via Certification Authority infrastructure, and tamper-evident audit logging using a Raftbased ordering service and CouchDB world state management. The results indicate that integrating a permissioned blockchain layer can significantly strengthen enterprise security posture by mitigating structural weaknesses inherent in centralized LMS systems. Although the current deployment remains limited in scale, the proposed model establishes a scalable foundation for secure, verifiable digital education infrastructures and future large-scale institutional integration.