Decentralized and Permission-Aware Blockchain for Certificate Security: An Exploratory Analysis

Certificate authenticity and validity are becoming increasingly important in various fields, such as education, professional licensing, and various types of documentation. However, secure distributed systems are subject to hacker attacks and data tampering leading to failure of whole system. The paper presents the results of a detailed survey obtained from various stakeholders of certificate management to emphasize the need of decentralized, immutable, secure, and transparent permissioned blockchain network with consortium consensus to ensure that the authorized issuers can issue certificates directly on the network. Confidentiality hashing algorithms and digital signature services provide input data integrity, endorsement, and non-repudiation. The paper discusses the need of a decentralized system that can be designed using Hyperledger Fabric. The proposed system is expected to be safe for certificate management, reducing the risk of centralized systems by using decentralization and cryptographic primitives.