Full text

Turn on search term navigation

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Degree attestation verification and traceability are complex one-to-one processes between the Higher Education Commission (HEC) and universities. The procedure shifted to the digitalized manner, but still, on a certain note, manual authentication is required. In the initial process, the university verified the degree and stamp seal first. Then, a physical channel of degree submission to the receiving ends is activated. After that, the degree is attested while properly examining and analyzing the tamper records related to degree credentials through e-communication with the university for verification and validation. This issue poses a serious challenge to educational information integrity and privacy. Potentially, blockchain technology could become a standardized platform to perform tasks including issuing, verifying, auditing, and tracing immutable records, which would enable the HEC, universities, and Federal Education Ministry (FEM) to quickly and easily get attested and investigate the forge proof versions of certificates. Besides, decentralized distributed data blocks in chronological order provide high security between distributed ledgers, consensus engine, digital signature, smart contracts, permissioned application, and private network node transactions that guarantee degree record validation and traceability. This paper presents an architecture (HEDU-Ledger) and detail design of blockchain-enabled hyperledger fabric applications implementation for degree attestation verification and traceable direct channel design between HEC and universities. The hyperledger fabric endorses attestation records first, and then validates (committer) the degree and maintains the secure chain of tracing between stakeholder peer nodes. Furthermore, this HEDU-Ledger architecture avoids language and administrative barriers. It also provides robustness in terms of security and privacy of records and maintains integrity with secure preservation as compared to that of the other state-of-the-art methods.

Details

Title
Educational Blockchain: A Secure Degree Attestation and Verification Traceability Architecture for Higher Education Commission
Author
Abdullah Ayub Khan 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Asif Ali Laghari 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Aftab Ahmed Shaikh 2 ; Bourouis, Sami 3 ; Amir Madany Mamlouk 4   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Alshazly, Hammam 5   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Department of Computer Science, Sindh Madressatul Islam University, Karachi 74000, Sindh, Pakistan; [email protected]; Research Lab of Artificial Intelligence and Information Security, Faculty of Computing Science and Information Technology, Benazir Bhutto Shaheed University Lyari, Karachi 75660, Sindh, Pakistan 
 Department of Computer Science, Sindh Madressatul Islam University, Karachi 74000, Sindh, Pakistan; [email protected] 
 Department of Information Technology, Collage of Computers and Information Technology, Taif University, P.O. Box 11099, Taif 21944, Saudi Arabia; [email protected] 
 Institute for Neuro- and Bioinformatics, University of Lübeck, 23562 Lübeck, Germany; [email protected] 
 Faculty of Computers and Information, South Valley University, Qena 83523, Egypt; [email protected] 
First page
10917
Publication year
2021
Publication date
2021
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
20763417
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2602008691
Copyright
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.