Secure Academic Certificate Verification: Review of QR Based, Digital Signatures and Digital Credential Approaches

Academic certificates are widely used for admissions, employment, licensing and study. When academic certificates are kept in paper form or spread across offices the process of checking them can take a long time. Digital certificates are more difficult to manage because they can be changed after being issued and it is hard to see that a change has happened by looking. This review will examine research and standards about QR verification, digital signatures, institutional registry, blockchains and verifiable credentials. This review will compare how each method keeps trust in the issuer keeps the data honest handles revocation protects privacy allows different systems to work together and the amount of effort needed to keep it running. From the literature it appears that each method partly satisfies all these needs. QR codes can help a user quickly find a record. Digital signatures can confirm that the signed data has not been altered. Registries can show whether a certificate is active, revoked or unknown. Blockchains can give a shared record. They need careful governance and management. This paper examines CertForge, a first educational solution built with FastAPI, SQLite, ReportLab, QR and Ed25519. The prototype has been tested with templates issuing bulk certificates signing registry entries PDF proof verification and revocation handling. The source code and tests show some problems in deployment, such as unsecured read endpoints, older certificates being affected by template changes and the signing key being stored locally without encryption. This paper will discuss CertForge as a prototype.