Session 6A: Papers SIGITE’18, October 3-6, 2018, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA

A Novel Blockchain-based Education

Records Verification Solution
Meng Han Zhigang Li Jing (Selena) He
Kennesaw State University Kennesaw State University Kennesaw State University
Marietta, GA Marietta, GA Marietta, GA
mhan9@kennesaw.edu zli8@kennesaw.edu she4@kennesaw.edu

Dalei Wu Ying Xie Asif Baba

University of Tennessee at Kennesaw State University
Chattanooga Marietta, GA
Chattanooga, TN yxie2@kennesaw.edu
dalei-wu@utc.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a novel blockchain-based technique for cre-
ating an environment where individuals can be the custodians of
their official education records and can easily share those records
with others. A blockchain is a digitized, decentralized, open record
of all cryptographic data exchanges. One key characteristic of the
blockchain is its decentralized nature. Unlike records or accounts
maintained by department, college, university, government agen-
cies and other institutions, the blockchain does not require an in-
termediary to complete education records or alter records. Our so-
lution incorporating the advanced features of blockchain allows
education providers to issue official certificates that supply proof
of completion or achievement. The proposed framework could also
provide the corresponding functions for the after-college educa-
tion and many other further usages.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Theory of computation → Theory of database privacy and
security; • General and reference → Design; • Applied com-
puting → Learning management systems; Digital libraries and
archives;
KEYWORDS
Blockchain, Education Record, Data Privacy, Data Security, System,
Framework
ACM Reference Format:
Meng Han, Zhigang Li, Jing (Selena) He, Dalei Wu, Ying Xie, and Asif Baba.
2018. A Novel Blockchain-based Education, Records Verification Solution.
In The 19th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (SIGITE
’18), October 3–6, 2018, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA,
6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3241815.3241870
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SIGITE ’18, October 3–6, 2018, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA
© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5954-2/18/10…$15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3241815.3241870
Tuskegee University
Tuskegee, AL
ababa@tuskegee.edu
1 INTRODUCTION
In today’s education and human resource system, how to store and
track the educational growth of an individual become more and
more crucial for multiple institutions from the college, graduate
college, to the employer’s HR system. Particularly, the exchange
and sharing of the learning record among education institutions
for one student are very common academic affairs last the whole
length of the study. These data are also used in colleges for paying
specific care to students extra attention. In most cases, the “official”
learning record of a student, a.k.a. transcript, only contains the
course number, an abbreviated course title, the letter grades, and
GPA (grade point average). It doesn’t show what the student has
done in taking the course. For the graduate school, the official tran-
script is a requirement for the student to show their performance
in the past; for their future employers, what a student has done in
taking the course that is most relevant to the job the student for
applying is probably the most important thing. Many employers
often request students to submit portfolios to demonstrate the stu-
dents’ capacity. But these portfolios are not “official” in any capac-
ity, and there is no guarantee that whatever the student presented
in the portfolio are of his/her work. This is especially important
since studies have shown that service-based learning or project-
based learning can significantly increase students’ opportunities
for landing a job [3]. Education background checks confirm the ap-
plicant’s type of degree or certificate, graduation date, attendance
dates, and any graduating honors. Education verification for em-
ployment purposes verifies the certification or educational claims
of a job applicant.
For decades, higher education institutions are the keepers and
sole authority when it comes to students learning records and cre-
dentials. Due to security concerns, institutions have been using an
obsolete and inadequate way to manage and authenticate student
records and credentials [8, 11]. Upon request, these credentials and
transcripts are delivered in sealed envelopes and have to be handed
directly to the relevant third parties. Any photocopies or unsealed
records that students keep personally are considered “unofficial”
and do not carry the same significance during the hiring or recruit-
ing process. Requesting these “official” records often involves a cer-
tain amount of fee from the students, which increases the financial
burden to the students, especially when they are still job hunting
without an income. In recent years, more and more institutions

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started to use some form of digital transcripts online. However,
these digital transcripts are generally designed to be used only
once. They are the equivalent of photocopies of the paper-based
transcripts or credentials and the records are not very secure in
nature [14]. This “institution as the record keeper” system makes
it very inefficient for any employers or relevant third parties to
verify the authenticity of student learning records and credentials.
It wastes time and money for the institutions, students, as well as
employers. Especially in the 21st century and the age of the inter-
net of everything, this process appears even more outdated and
inadequate.
Since the institutions are the sole authority and keeper of stu-
dent learning records and credentials, it makes it even cumbersome
for an employer or a relevant third party to verify the learning
records and credentials when a student attends or takes courses
across different institutions. This is the disadvantage of centraliza-
tion. It means that the student or the employer has to reach out to
multiple institutions to request the “official” transcripts. More fees
are going to be involved and a more financial burden is going to
be put on the student. It also means that more time will be needed
for multiple institutions to respond. Building a centralized national
database for such purpose is possible on paper but the cost will be
astronomical. It will also be challenging to implement technolog-
ically due to the vast differences of the systems used in different
institutions across the country. Even so, such system will not be
able to help if the learner attends schools from different countries.
However, it is not a trivial project to exchange, share, and pro-
vide the verification for many traditional scenarios. Multiple chal-
lenges are standing in front of the target:
• The data of learning records or study achievement need au-
thorized organization to provide credentials. This fact will
result in the very limited number of data providers as well
as the complicated authorization procedure.
• The privacy and security concern is closely followed by these
personal data. How to access and use the data securely while
preserving privacy is a very challenge task.
• The size of data for each record may not be large, but bring
all the data from individuals would build a huge capacity,
which makes it very hard to manage.
This paper proposes a novel blockchain-based technique for cre-
ating an environment where individuals can be the custodians of
their official education records and can easily share those records
with others. A blockchain is a digitized, decentralized, open record
of all cryptographic data exchanges. The most famous example
would be Bitcoin, but the design feature of blockchain provides
much bigger application scope for blockchain [10]. One key charac-
teristic of the blockchain is its decentralized nature. Unlike records
or accounts maintained by department, college, university, govern-
ment agencies and other institutions, the blockchain does not re-
quire an intermediary to complete education records or alter records.
Each user within a blockchain has a private encryption key linked
to their block, and when a change is made to that block, every
block linked before and after it is updated, creating an irreversible
record. This allows the participants to verify and audit transactions
inexpensively [12]. With a blockchain, many people can write en-
tries into a record of information (such as education records), and
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SIGITE’18, October 3-6, 2018, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA
a community of users can control how the record of information
is amended and updated.
Blockchain technology, with its tamper-proof security and de-
centralized structure, allows institutions and students to manage
learning records and credentials over a secure and distributed net-
work. It makes it possible for students to be the owner of their
learning records and credentials [7, 9]. This means that they can
share their learning records or credentials with anyone and have
them trusted to be authentic. Also, institutions or learning organi-
zations no longer have to build a centralized storage unit or applica-
tion to securely store students’ records or data. It can significantly
lower the cost of managing and maintaining student records for
both institutions and students [14].
Blockchain technology also helps with the issue when a learner
attends or takes the course from different institutions. This is es-
pecially relevant given the increasing popularity of Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs), nano-degrees, and digital badges. The
transformation from college degrees to lifelong learning creden-
tials requires a different way of storing, managing, and authen-
ticating learning records and credentials. Blockchain technology
can help break down the institutional barrier and allow students
to keep and maintain their learning history across different insti-
tutions and organizations.
Using the smart contract [4, 19], a student’s learning record can-
not only contain the As and Bs along with course titles, but also
the actual work they’ve done in a lab or a service-learning project.
Employers will not only be able to verify the authenticity of an
applicant’s learning records and credentials but will also be able
to see what the applicant has done that are most relevant to the
job he/she is applying. Unlike the portfolios that students create
and maintain individually, employers can trust that the applicant’s
work is authentic and of his/her own. It will also only take the em-
ployer minutes if not seconds to verify the learning records and
history of the applicant without having to contact or wait for the
response from the institution.
Our solution incorporating the advanced features of blockchain
will allow education providers to issue official certificates that sup-
ply proof of completion or achievement. These certificates can be
collected by individuals and shared directly with anyone who re-
quires official documents. Furthermore, the education is not just a
period experience but a lifelong project. People continue to learn
through their life experiences, their work, and professional train-
ing. Accruing evidence of those learning experiences is just as im-
portant as tracking formal education. Our resolution can also pro-
vide the corresponding functions for the after-college education.
The main contribution of this solution could be summarised as
follows:
• By incorporating the decentralized data storage of blockchain,
our solution could allow the participated organization and
individual to easily establish the authorized access to the
data belonging to corresponding parties.
• The secure and private nature of blockchain could guarantee
the privacy and security of data stored on it, and provide
customized access to different parties.
Session 6A: Papers
Education Education Record
Institution Verification System
Figure 1: The Structure of the Proposed Solution
• The cost of blockchain-based storage could be reduced to
half of the typical cloud-based storage. This allows our res-
olution could be much applicable concerning cost to a great
extent.
As shown in Fig. 1, the proposed solution provide a bridge for
both the educational institution and the individual users (graduate
students, or the third parties). The nodes of the blockchain network
incorporate a consensus algorithm to determine the transaction’s
validity, and when the node agrees to the change, it is permanently
committed to the blockchain (public ledger). The individual client
can connect to the blockchain and download the documents avail-
able to her/him. And all these documentation are decrypted using
the individual’s private key.
In this paper, we work on the defense of clique-based attack and
proposed a couple of fundamental results in theoretical complexity
analysis, then proposed the efficient and effective algorithms to
solve the proposed problem. Firstly, we give the motivation and
the background with examples of the typical problems in Section
1. Secondly, some preliminary knowledge of blockchain and the
classical electrical education records techniques are presented in
Section 2. In Section 3, we introduce our solution and the detailed
design of our solution in each component. Then, we discussed the
education value of our solutions. Finally, Section 5 concludes this
work.
2 PRELIMINARY KNOWLEDGE
2.1 Blockchain Techniques
There is no getting around blockchain without mentioning the name
of the infamous Bitcoin. Since its first appearance in the cryptocur-
rency Bitcoin, blockchain technology has outgrown its novelty and
attracted attention across all industries. First proposed by the mys-
teries figure(s) named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, Bitcoin was the
first real-life application of blockchain technology. Created post
the financial crisis; Bitcoin was believed to be a defiance of the fi-
nancial system and institutions that have lost the trust of the peo-
ple [13]. Over the past decade, Bitcoin has made its name known
to the public through its ups and downs, promises and downfalls.
Despite its wide exposure, few people know what Bitcoin is, let
alone understand blockchain, the technology that made all these
happen.
Before we dive into the blockchain, we need to discuss the ori-
gin of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency that made blockchain tech-
nology what it is today. In 2008, Nakamoto published a white-
paper discussing a purely peer-to-peer electronic cash system. The
system, named Bitcoin, uses an ongoing chain of records to keep
time-stamped transactions that are secured by cryptography. The
records, called blocks, cannot be altered without changing all the
subsequent blocks. The chain of blocks, or blockchain, serves as a
SIGITE’18, October 3-6, 2018, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA
Query
Blockchain-based Individual
Data Storage Response Client
publically accessible digital ledger. Unlike traditional financial in-
stitutions that keep records of all transactions in a centralized sys-
tem, the blockchain is replicated in a peer-to-peer network that is
accessible to anyone [13]. To put it in layman’s term, a blockchain
can be defined as a distributed secure log file.
Since 2008, a growing number of businesses including brick and
mortar stores started to accept Bitcoin as payment. Some of the
merchants are well-known names such as Microsoft, Subway, Over-
stock.com, Expedia, and Newegg. People have used Bitcoins to buy
drinks in pubs, cars from the dealerships, even as payment for real
estate [5, 20].
Bitcoin, or rather the blockchain technology, caught the atten-
tion of financial institutions almost immediately after the release.
It’s decentralized network and secure by design nature allow users
to cut out the middleman, and thus, reduce the transaction cost
and increase efficiency. In 2014, a group of financial institutions
formed a consortium to explore the possibility of using blockchain
to improve the efficiency of payments between banks. However,
the anonymity nature of Satoshi’s original design of blockchain
goes contrary to the practices of banking institutions as financial
laws in both the U.S. and other countries require the identity of
people adding the blocks to be known. To solve this issue, the con-
sortium of financial institutions proposed the concept of “permis-
sion ledger”. Unlike open blockchains such as Bitcoin, in permis-
sion ledger, the identity of people adding blocks is known, and the
right to create new blocks is assigned by the people who run the
code [13].
In addition to the finance sector, ideas of applying and imple-
menting blockchain technology in other areas have also been pro-
posed or conceptualized. In late 2013, a computer-science student
named Vitalik Buterin created an entirely new blockchain called
Ethereum. Ethereum features smart contracts, also called Ether, as
the currency. It allows users to publish software programs that are
secure from censors and can be operated infinitely in the absence
of its creator [1, 13, 18]. Ethereum, along with the smart contract,
showed the world that blockchain technology could be a viable
solution to many of the real-world situations other than being an
alternative solution to the traditional financial system.
Since 2014, blockchain technology has seen implementation in
industry sectors such as consumer products, manufacturing, me-
dia, telecommunications, healthcare, and government [15]. IBM
has joined forces with the Linux Foundation on the Hyperledger
project that is building an open source, standardized, and production-
grade digital ledger. A blockchain startup called Factom is working
with the Honduran government on a land registry project. It is also
involved in some projects in China such as smart cities and digital
notarization services [17].
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The development and implementation of blockchain technology
in other industry sectors didn’t go unnoticed by educators. The se-
cure and decentralized nature of blockchain technology makes it a
perfect technological solution for some of the areas in higher edu-
cation that are desperately in need of improvement and innovation.
One such area is the storage, management, and authentication of
student records and credentials.
In the current learning environment, there are several challenges
facing higher education institutions when it comes to the storage,
management, and authentication of student records and creden-
tials.
One of the earlier adopters of blockchain technology for student
recording keeping is the Holberton School of Software Engineer-
ing, a California-based institution established in 2015. The Holber-
ton school offers learner a paper certificate at the end of the pro-
gram as well as a digital certificate that is inserted into the Bitcoin
blockchain.
In addition to utilizing an existing public blockchain such as
Bitcoin, other efforts have been made to use blockchain technology
to address issues of authoring, managing, and delivering learning
resources [10]. Using blockchain technology, different individuals
or publishers across different institutions can use author, manage,
and deliver learning objects or components directly to the learners
and thus, eliminate the middleman. One such example is a startup
called On-Demand Education Marketplace (ODEM). ODEM uses
smart contract to allow educators and learners to connect directly
with cutting institutions out of the loop, and thus reducing the cost
for learners.
Another example of blockchain’s use in education is a company
called Education. Education is an educational platform born out
of Dubai Future Accelerators. It has launched the world’s largest
pilot of blockchain technology in education and is affecting over
400,000 students.
3 SOLUTION PROPOSAL
3.1 Blockchain
The fundamental role of blockchain is a decentralized network which
enables all parties to make transactions in a trustless network to
trust each other. The blockchain has a distributed ledger that con-
tains connected blocks of transactions for all the members of the
network. Participants in the network administer and accept by con-
sensus on the updates to the records in the ledger. No central,
third-party mediator get involved in verifying the activities of the
network. The heavy use of cryptography is the key characteristic
of blockchain networks which carries authoritativeness behind all
the interactions in the network [6]. Applying blockchain for the
education record tracking and verification can secure the sensitive
users’ data by recording communication and control information
as transactions in the distributed ledger.
3.2 Components of an Education Record
As shown at the top of Fig. 2, we store our Education Record (Er)
into the blockchain for data exchange and information sharing. (1)
Similar like Bitcoin, in our solution we also use SHA 256 for the
hash function, which brings a very low conflict rate of the hash-
ing process; (2) the Signature is signed by the originating node,
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SIGITE’18, October 3-6, 2018, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA
Hash
Signature
Resource
Index
(SHA 256) URL
Header
Hash (SHA 256)
Previous Hash
Signature
Hash from (Hash(Er1.Hash +Er2.Hash)) Hash from (Hash(Er3.Hash +Er4.Hash))
Er1 Er2 Er3 Er4
Figure 2: The Components of a Block in Blockchain with Ed-
ucation Record
which allows the system about, provide a private access to each
different education institution or individual; (3) the resource URL
is a reference to the additional education record resource location,
such as the original electronic copy of the diploma, or other re-
sources; (3) the last one is the index, which could allow the system
to achieve the data discovery without the content leaking regard-
ing the record.
The education record is demonstrated in the structure chart of
Fig. 2. The top level is the header of the block; then the Hash func-
tion is calculated to construct each layer. For each transaction, the
Hash, Signature, Resource URL, and Index are the four main com-
ponents.
3.3 System Architecture
The main architecture includes the provider node, individual node,
and the miner around the blockchain as the center of the system. In
the education record tracking and verification process, we assume
that many nodes and the education institution providers trustfully
manage the database on servers with the network connectivity,
The record could be added to the system with the support of data,
then the data will be transferred to the blockchain system with se-
curity and privacy consideration. Another end of individual nodes
could also access their profile in the architecture, and exchange
the data with the provider node according to the specific rule de-
veloped by all the parity involved into the system [2].
In Fig. 3, the education record can be added to the system with
the maintenance of different components, and posted to the blockchain
finally. The individual could also try to access the data but may be
rejected due to their registration status, and be notified once there
is any particular update.
The miner in the system refers to the instance who was adding
blocks to the blockchain. Different from Bitcoin, which use Proof
of Work model, where very high computational power is expended
for making the censuses. Since we assume that there are trusted
parties involved in the system already, we expect that the nodes
can provide proof. Thus, the data about the transaction referred can
Session 6A: Papers SIGITE’18, October 3-6, 2018, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA

Provider Node
A Ethereum Client
Education Backend
Record Lib EduRec Service
Manager B
Add Record Update
Resolve Address
DB Check Permissions on Post New Record
Gatekeeper Current Chain Link the Data from both End

Database C

Blockchain
Mining
Singed Query Request G Query Result
Bounty
Miner
D
Database
Updated
E Individual Node
Notification Education Ethereum Client
Record Backend
Manager EduRec Service
Update Status
Reject or Acknowledge
F

Figure 3: The Architecture of the Proposed System

be meaningfully interpreted within all the authorized unit. This al- Only certified institutions could be allowed to access and update
ternative way could allow the blockchain consistency well. the data in the system under the restricted rules.

3.4 The Usage of Smart Contract
The concept of smart contract, proposed by Nick Szabo, is defined
as a computerized transaction protocol that executes the terms of
a contract [16]. The methodology has only recent years come into
use with the appearance of distributed ledger technology. Under
the blockchain context, smart contracts are stored scripts on the
blockchain with the unique address.
The smart contract could be triggered by addressing a transac-
tion and executed automatically in a required manner. The trigger-
ing transaction also allowed to have a general purpose computa-
tion on the blockchain. The smart contract could allow the educa-
tion record system to execute the commands automatically based
on users’ preferences. For example, the employer could directly re-
ceive the latest update if there is an employee belonging to a part-
time education program, and this is not limited to the transcript
but also includes the academic achievement or any other project
experience. All the commands don’t need a centralized system and
the blockchain secures users’ private information.
As shown in Fig. 4, the contract structures and the relationships
within our solution are illustrated. Once the data was registered,
the smart contract could allow different individual and organiza-
tion to implement the contract which covers the operation of each
other once the condition of the contract could be satisfied. The
relationships between each individual or between the individual
and organization are all considered and stored in the blockchain.
The address would be the unique key for all the transactions and
data exchange. Policies coded into the contract could regulate the
new identities or change the mapping of existing one’s registration.
4 EDUCATION VALUE
Both the education institution and education records users could
benefit from our proposed data exchange platform. From both per-
spectives, the benefits are gained from both the greater convenience
and better care outcomes for individuals. The blockchain technol-
ogy provides the education a new way to incorporate data with pri-
vacy and security concerns. This would be one of the most promis-
ing domain to apply the data-driven intelligence as well as big
room for further business value discovery.
Education Institution Perspective:
• The collaborative nature of different institutions could be
achieved. This will eliminate many of the challenges of ex-
isting educations system, and provide huge potential to fur-
ther improve the quality of education.
• The Data-driven competitive advantage between different
parities involved in the system could be avoided, and the
life-time education and achievement record could be store
and shared with all the authorized organizations.
• The data of the students could also be shared for the research
especially the education research activities for further lever-
age of the power of data-driven intelligence.
Records Users Perspective:
• The individual no longer need to coordinate with multiple
agencies to gather records and pay for the extra cost for ed-
ucation verification.
• The user could retain the control of their data without hav-
ing to be a data manager. It is not required for them to spend
time and energy to maintain the data.

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Session 6A: Papers
Registration
ID Discovery
SmartContract SmartContract SmartContract
Individual 1 Individual 2 Individual 3
Relationship
Individual 1-Provider 2 Individual 1-Provider 3
Blockchain Queries Reference Queries Reference
Network Nodes
Database
Provider2
Figure 4: The Data Contract Structure of Each Part
• The manual record tracking and management are not needed
anymore, and the data from multiple providers could be pro-
vided directly.
5 CONCLUSION
Our solution incorporating the advanced features of blockchain
will allow education providers to issue official certificates that sup-
ply proof of completion or achievement. These certificates can be
collected by individuals and shared directly with anyone who re-
quires official documents. Furthermore, the education is not just a
period experience but a lifelong project. People continue to learn
through their life experiences, their work, and professional train-
ing. Accruing evidence of those learning experiences is just as im-
portant as tracking formal education. Our resolution can also pro-
vide the corresponding functions for the after-college education.
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