Adopting emulation-based approach in verifying e-certificates using permissioned blockchain
Abdul Razak, Thineswar Thineswar, Anang Hudaya Muhamad Amin, Nazrul Muhaimin Ahmad · AIP conference proceedings · 2025
A certificate showcases a person's achievement or proficiency and can be in the form of physical paper, electronic or digital form. Paper-based certificates are challenging to manage and store over a long period of time. The process of issuing certificates and the content varies significantly from one issuer to another. Hence, a digital form of these certificates known as e-certificate has gained wide acceptance for various purposes. E-certificates are much easier to manage and store. However, these e-certificates lack authentication. Verifying e-certificates takes longer time and involves tedious processes that may not be preferred by the reviewers. It is also difficult to verify fake e-certificates. A skillfully generated fake e-certificate is difficult to identify and may be treated as genuine. Hence, the credibility of both the e-certificate owner and issuer is at risk. Applications for Blockchain 3.0 technology have recently emerged as a potential means for verifying e-certificates to battle fraud and misuse. In this paper, we present our on-going research on designing a permissioned-based e-certificate verification system using an emulation approach. The design incorporates important blockchain components including smart contracts and secure hashing algorithms. A use case on academic certificate verification was used to evaluate the proposed design. The results of evaluation made show indicate that the use of permissioned blockchain enables seamless and secure verification of e-certificates, even though the possibility of the front- end component of the system to be compromised exists. The design could be generalized to other domains which require electronic documents to be verified as part of Blockchain 3.0 application.