ShareCert: Sharing and Authenticating Certificates and Credentials on Blockchain

Abstract

The process of certificate and credential verification of every candidate is an essential step in the recruitment phase of every organization. Today, most of this work is usually outsourced to external agencies. Owing to the presence of third parties and lack of transparency in the verification process, there is a possibility of fraud or undetected error creeping in at every stage. The recruiter is at the risk of hiring a fraudulent candidate and the candidate at the risk of facing a rejection due to inefficient verification. Moreover, the existing procedure for this verification takes around 30 days per candidate. Today, blockchain technology assisted with smart contracts have applications ranging from Supply Chain Management to Digital identity, Banking, Insurance and many (any) other scenarios where multiple entities form a network to trade or query any kind of assets. Using smart contracts, a decentralized data store, content-hash based verification and blockchain, we’ve developed a design for decentralized applications to address the existing issue of certificate and credential verification. These decentralized applications bring about transparency, privacy, provenance tracking and trust to the procedure of sharing and authenticating credentials and certificates. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed design based on the results from our implementation on Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. In terms of efficiency, our implementations support near real-time verification of certificates and credentials, thereby providing a faster, secure and transparent verification mechanism.