Design of Privacy Preserving Model for Academic Documents Issuance and Verification Using Distributed Hyperledger Fabric Approach (PACIV) and SSI

Objectives: The challenges faced towards issuance of academic documents, verification of documents and moderation by authorities in comparison to traditional methods. Academic certificates issuance and verification can benefit greatly from blockchain-based privacy-preserving models, which offers a promising alternative to traditional paper-based methods. Primary objective of this research work PACIV is to establish a secure and decentralized network for managing academic certificates, the underlying technology used is the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. Methods: Proposed PACIV platform connects student community, faculty members and academic members from multiple universities to different verifiers, as well limiting number of verifiers to whom students can present their certificates. The Hyperledger fabric and self-sovereign Identity model used for preserving the privacy of academic certificates issuance and verification. Findings: Performance evaluation assesses the system's speed, throughput, and latency. Observed time taken for a transaction to complete is found to be 320ms for 100 peers to 479 ms for 400 peers in use. Novelty: PACIV approach is implemented in this research to secure academic university certificates access from unauthorized access and providing more improved privacy and security with the practical implementation by applying SSI model. Keywords: Hyperledger Fabric, Blockchain, Privacy protection, SSI, Academic documents