Secure degree attestation and traceability verification based on zero trust using QP-DSA and RD-ECC

The process of rendering authenticity to the Degree Certificate (DC) is known as Degree Attestation (DA). None of the prevailing works have focused on zero trust-based DA, verification, and traceability for secured DA. So, zero trust-based secured DA, verification, and traceability of degree credentials are presented in the paper. Primarily, to upload the DC of the student, the university registers and logs in to the Blockchain (BC). Subsequently, by utilizing radioactive decay-based elliptic curve cryptography (RD-ECC), the DC is secured. Next, by utilizing Glorot initialization-based Proof-of-Stake (GPoS), the data is stored in the BC. Further, to verify the traceability of the data, a Smart Contract (SC) is created. In the meantime, the student registers and logs in to the BC and gives attestation requests to the university. By utilizing rail fence cipher (RFC) RD-ECC hash-based message authentication code (RFCR-HMAC), the university authenticates the request. By utilizing a quadratic probing-based digital signature algorithm (QP-DSA), the university attests the DC after authentication. Lastly, by utilizing RD-ECC, the attested certificate is encrypted and sent to the student. Hence, the certificate is secured with an encryption time (ET) of 5971ms and DA is performed with a Signature Generation Time (SGT) of 6637ms.