Blockchain Driven Multi Tier Academic Credential Validation System

Abstract: The rise of fraudulent academic certificates has led to serious real-world issues, such as the use of fake degree certificates for jobs and visas. It also causes noteworthy disruptions in the hiring process. Although trust in institutions has been reduced, some research has been conducted to validate the authenticity of certificates. Blockchain- based verification systems focus on storing and validating certificates but often fail to provide integrated issuer authentication, tamper-proof privacy protection, and low-cost solutions. In this proposed work, research is done on an integrated, comprehensive, decentralised framework for certificate verification that together validates both the certificate and the issuer's authority. In addition, it protects the certificate from being tampered with. In addition, hash function mapping was employed for faster searching. The proposed solution is experimentally validated by creating a structure that incorporates zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to safeguard data, self-destructing smart contracts to exclude replay attacks, and post-quantum lattice-based signatures to ensure security versus failures. In addition, a hash-based indexing method is used to accelerate certificate searches while reducing storage demands. In experimental analysis, measure the performance of proposed work in private. The Ethereum blockchain indicates that the proposed approach attains low transaction and gas costs, fast retrieval times, and high verification compared to previous research techniques. This overall analysis achieves 94% of a scalable and privacy-preserving solution for authenticating academic credentials in real-world scenarios.

Keywords: Block chain, Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), Ethereum, Tamper-Proof, post-quantum lattice, hash-based indexing, smart contract.