DocsChain: Blockchain based IoT Solution for Verficiation of Degree Documents

Degree verification is the process of verifying the academic credentials of successfully graduated students and universities annually spent millions of dollars for handling this process of degree verification. Hence, there is a dire need to minimize the degree verification cost and Massachusetts Institute of Technology has introduced the blockcerts, a blockchain based solution for freely handling the degree verification requests. Although Blockcerts eliminates the cost of degree verification but it also alters the existing workflow of degree issuance and verification. Blockerts is primarily focused on facilitating the students and there is a room for improvement from the prospective of educational institutes. Contribution of this paper is to introduce the solution of DocsChain which is focused on facilitating both students and education institutes by maintaining the existing social workflow of degree issuance and verification. In contrast to Blockcerts, DocsChain allows the educational institutes for bulk submission of multiple degree documents. For the verification, it operates over the photocopies of the degree documents and collect digital information from these copies using the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) enabled IoT/WoT cameras. Extracted digital information is then passed to a one-way hashing algorithm to collect the equivalent hash which is then used for searching from the DocsChain using the concept of PoE (Proof of Existence). © 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works