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Stream/Area:
-
Subject:
-
Paper ID:
IJSREM68263
Volume:
10 |
10 |
Oct 2026
Pages:
1-6
Publication Frequency:
Monthly (12 issues per year)
License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.
computer engineering
Sandip Institute Of Technology and Research center Nashik
computer engineering
Sandip Institute Of Technology and Research center Nashik
computer engineering
Sandip Institute Of Technology and Research center Nashik
computer engineering
Sandip Institute Of Technology and Research center Nashik
computer engineering
Sandip Institute Of Technology and Research center Nashik
Academic credentials underpin hiring, admissions, and professional licensing decisions, yet the manual, paper-based, and centralized systems used to issue and verify them remain slow and forgeable. Diploma mills and altered transcripts continue to circulate at scale, and existing digital-verification services still route trust through a single central authority. This paper presents a comprehensive review of blockchain- and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI)-based academic credentialing published between 2016 and 2026 and, based on the synthesized literature, formulates an SSI platform built on the W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credential (VC) standards. Institutions act as issuers that sign VCs bound to a graduate’s DID; students hold and control these credentials in a personal digital wallet; and employers or other institutions act as verifiers that check the credential’s signature and revocation status against a permissioned blockchain trust registry, without contacting the issuing institution directly. Zero-knowledge selective disclosure lets a holder reveal only the attributes a verifier needs, reducing over-disclosure of personal data, while a rule-based fraud-pattern layer flags diploma-mill and altered-transcript indicators. Component boundaries, the credential lifecycle, Merkle-accumulator revocation, and evaluation metrics—verification latency, fraud-detection precision and recall, disclosure minimization, and on-chain cost—are systematically detailed without reporting uncollected empirical data.
KEYWORDS
This review surveyed blockchain- and SSI-based academic credentialing work from 2016 to 2026 and found no published system that combines standards-compliant DID/VC issuance, blockchain-anchored institutional trust, zero-knowledge selective disclosure, and revocation, evaluated specifically against academic-credential fraud. We proposed a platform that fills that gap: institutions issue W3C-standard Verifiable Credentials bound to student DIDs, students hold and selectively disclose them from a personal wallet, and verifiers check signatures and revocation status against a permissioned blockchain registry without contacting the institution directly. A rule-based layer flags presentation patterns associated with known diploma-mill and transcript-alteration fraud. The evaluation framework sets up the measurements a follow-up implementation study will report.
[1] VerifyED, "Diploma Mill List 2026: How to Check If a School Is Fake," VerifyED Guides, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://verifyed.org/guides/diploma-mill-list-2026 [2] Parchment, "Diploma Mills and Academic Fraud: The Hidden Global Financial Impact," Parchment Blog, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.parchment.com/blog/global-financial-impact-of-diploma-mills-and-academic-fraud/ [3] A. Ezell and J. Bear, "Degree Mills: The Billion-Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas," Amherst, NY, USA: Prometheus Books, 2012. [4] A. J. Zwitter, O. J. Gstrein, and E. Yap, "Digital identity and the blockchain: Universal identity management and the concept of the 'self-sovereign' individual," Front. Blockchain, vol. 3, art. 26, 2020. [5] Sovrin Foundation, "Self-Sovereign Identity: A Comprehensive Guide to Decentralized Identity Management," Sovrin Foundation Rep., 2020. [Online]. Available: https://sovrin.org [6] World Wide Web Consortium, "Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0," W3C Recommendation, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.w3.org/TR/did/ [7] World Wide Web Consortium, "Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0," W3C, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/ [8] P. Schmidt, "Blockcerts: An open infrastructure for academic credentials on the blockchain," 2016. [Online]. Available: https://www.blockcerts.org [9] BlockTechCert, "BTCert: Academic certificate authentication via Blockcerts," GitHub repository, accessed 2026. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/BlockTechCert/BTCert [10] R. Arenas and P. Fernandez, "CredenceLedger: A permissioned blockchain for verifiable academic credentials," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Eng., Technol. Innov. (ICE/ITMC), 2018, pp. 1–6.
Publication Date
10/24/2026
Peer Review Type
Double-Blind Peer Review
Review Rounds: 2
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Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this research work.
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No funding information available for this research.
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