A Secure Storage and Verification Framework Based on Consortium Blockchain for Engineering Education Accreditation Data

The majors accredited by the Engineering Education Accreditation (EEA) reflect the accreditation agency’s recognition of the school’s engineering programs. Excellent accreditation management holds significant importance for the advancement of engineering education programs. However, the traditional engineering education system framework suffers from the opacity of raw education data and the difficulty for accreditation bodies to forensically examine the self-assessment reports. To solve these issues, an EEA framework based on Hyperledger Fabric blockchain technology is proposed in this work. Firstly, all relevant stakeholders and information interactions occur within the blockchain network, ensuring the authenticity of educational data and enhancing the transparency of accreditation processes. Secondly, multiple roles are abstracted into a single organization to optimize the network topology. The original data is stored off-chain, and the hash values of the data are stored on-chain to reduce on-chain storage costs. The experimental results show that the proposed framework has a high throughput and the network latency of writing data to the blockchain is reduced by at least 0.04 s. It effectively improves network performance and security, which provides new insights for EEA management.